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(WROUGHT DEPOSIT. 



BIOGRAPHY 



OF 



Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. 



n^1 



r 



1 



A BIOGRAPHY 



OF 



KEOEMY WAR!) BEECHER. 




BY 



Wm. C. Beecher and Key. Samuel Scoville, 



ASSISTED BY 



MRS. HENRY WARD BEECHER 



MAr 



New York : 
CHARLES L. WEBSTER & COMPANY. 

1888. 






Copyrighted by 
CHARLES L. WEBSTER & COMPANY, 

1888 
{All rights reserved.) 



H. J. HEWITT, 

PRINTER AND ELECTROTYPER, 

27 ROSE STREET, N. Y. 




$0 ©XIV ptotft**, 



WHOSE FAITHFUL LOVE AND PATIENT SELF-DEVOTION COM- 
FORTED AND STRENGTHENED OUR BELOVED FATHER 
DURING TROUBLES, BLESSED AND ENCOUR- 
AGED HIM IN PROSPERITY, 

A TRUE COMPANION AND DEVOTED HELPMEET, 

WE DEDICATE THIS STORY OF HIS LIFE. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 



Ancestry — Beecher — Ward — Foote — The Anvil — The Oak — Court- 
ship and Marriage of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote — 
Home at East Hampton, Long Island — Removal to Litchfield, 
Connecticut 17-29 

CHAPTER II. 

Litchfield — Situation — Natural Features — Early Settlers — Social 
and Moral Advantages — Patriotism— North Street described 
— The Beecher Home — Birth of Henry Ward — The Times at 
Home and Abroad — His Birth-Mark 30-45 

CHAPTER III. 

Early Glimpses — Recollections of the Mother— Going to School at 
Ma'am Kilbourne's — His First Letter — District School — The 
Coming of the New Mother — His First Ride on Horseback — 
A Merry Household — Fishing Excursions — Minister's Wood- 
Spell — Saturday Night — Going to Meeting — The Puritan Sab- 
bath— The Cold of Litchfield Hill— Rats— Work— The Cate- 
chism — Formative Influences — Summing Up 46-71 

CHAPTER IV. 

Boyhood— Sent to School at Bethlehem— The Widow Ingersoll's— 
Failure — A Champion — Sent to Catharine Beecher's School in 
Hartford — Humorous Incidents — Religious Experience 72-81 

CHAPTER V. 

Boston — Home Atmosphere — Various Experiences — Ethics rub- 
bed in by a Six-pound Shot — Discontent — Makes up his Mind 
to go to Sea — To Study Navigation — Picture of his Life in 
Boston 82-92 



8 CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER VI. 

School-Life at Mount Pleasant — Mathematics — Elocution — Testi- 
mony of Classmates — Religious Experiences — Troubles — A 
Romantic Friendship — Another Kind — Letter of Reminis- 
cence — A Royal School-Boy 93-108 

CHAPTER VII. 

Amherst College — Private Journal — Testimony of Classmates — 
Tutor's Delight — Begins his Anti-Slavery Career — Spiritual 
Darkness — Engagement — Letters of his Mother — Experiences 
in Teaching School — First Sermons — Lecturing — His Reading 
— The Record .' 109-135 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Lane Seminary— Dr. Beecher Called — Home at Walnut Hills — 
Amusing Incidents — Family Meeting — Death of Mrs. Beecher 
— Extracts from Journal — First Mention of Preaching in the 
West — Experience in Ecclesiastical Matters — Despondency — 
Meeting of Synod — Influences of the Times — Revulsion — A 
Rift along the Horizon — " Full iolly Knight " 136-156 

CHAPTER IX. 

Call to Preach — License — Examination by Miami Presbytery— Re- 
fusal to Subscribe to Old School — Ordination by Oxford Pres- 
bytery — Visit East — Marriage — Housekeeping 157-180 

CHAPTER X. 

The New Field — Growth of Influence — Social Life — The Secret of 
Effective Preaching — Editorial Labors — Lectures to Young 
Men — Call to Brooklyn — Departure 181-209 

CHAPTER XL 

Invitation to come East — Call to Plymouth Church — Friendly Mis- 
givings — Plainly Outlining his Views — Early Success — Ply- 
mouth Burned — Preaching in the Tabernacle 210-224. 

CHAPTER XII. 

Plymouth Church — The New Building — Sabbath Service — Prayer- 
Meeting — Weekly Lecture — Socials — Church Polity — The Pas- 
tor's Policy 225-232 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Beginning of the Great Battle — Five Great Eras — Compromise 
Measures of 1850 — "Shall We Compromise" — The Fugitive 
Slave Law denounced — Right of Free Speech defended — 



CONTENTS. 



Commercial Liberty— Fighting Caste — Liberty of the Pulpit 
defended — Quickness of Retort — Sentiment of the Times — 
Reaction — Visit of Kossuth — Election of 1852 — The Parker 
Controversy — Degraded into Liberty — John Mitchel — Garri- 
son — Close of this Era 233-270 

CHAPTER XIV. 

The Battle renewed — Repeal of the Missouri Compromise pro- 
posed — The Struggle in Congress — Mr. Beecher's Appeals — 
The Battle lost in Congress is transferred to the Territories — 
Forces engaged — Kansas War — Dred Scott Decision — Mr. 
Beecher's Defence of Kansas — " Beecher's Bibles" — Charles 
Sumner attacked in the Senate — The FremorK Campaign — 
The Dog Noble 271-291 

CHAPTER XV. 

Remarkable Experiences — The Edmonson Sisters — Pinky and her 
Freedom-Ring — Slave Auction in Plymouth Church — John 
Brown — The Wrong and Right Way — Election of Abraham 
Lincoln — Secession — Buchanan's Fast 292-308 

CHAPTER XVI. 

War Begun — Firing upon Fort Sumter — "The American Eagle 
as you want it" — Death of Col. Ellsworth — Equips his Sons — 
Personal Feeling yields to Patriotism — His House a Store- 
house of Military Supplies — Sends a Regiment as his Sub- 
stitute — Our National Flag — The Camp, its Dangers and Duties 
— Bull Run — Becomes Editor of the Independent — Salutatory 
— The Trent Affair — Fight, Tax — Soldiers or Ferrets — Charac- 
teristics as an Editor — One Nation, one Constitution, one 
Stany Banner — McClellan Safe, and Richmond too — Mildly 
carrying on War — The Root of the Matter — The only Ground 
— A Queer Pulpit — President's Proclamation of Emancipation 
— Let come what will— Close of the Third Era 309-33$ 

CHAPTER XVII. 

First Voyage.to England — Extracts from Diary — Warwick Castle — 
Stratford-on-Avon — The Skylark — Oxford — Bodleian Library 
— London — Old-time Sadness— Paris — Catch-Words from 
Diary— Effect of Picture-Gallery— The Louvre — His Return. . 339~349 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

Church and Steamboat — Jenny Lind — Hospitalit)' — Colonel Pert- 
zel — The Family — Twins — Medicine— Giving Counsel — For 
the Sailor — An Absurd Story contradicted — Salisbury — Trout- 
ing — Death of Alfred and Arthur — Letters to his Daugh- 



IO CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

ter at School — Lenox — Equivocal Honors declined — The 
Pulpit — "Plymouth Collection" — "Shining Shore" — A 
Church Liturgy — Courting with his Father's old Love-letters — 
1857 a Year of Trial— Matteawan — Visit to Litchfield — 1858 a 
Year of Harvest — Revival Meetings — Hospitality of Plymouth 
Church — Courtesy to Errorists — New Organ — Peekskill — Let- 
ters to his Daughter abroad — Marriage of his Daughter — Lec- 
turing — Title-of D.D. declined — Flowers in Church — Christian 
Liberty in the use of the Beautiful — His two Lines of Labor. .. 350-395 

CHAPTER XIX. 

Visit to England in 1863 — The Need of Rest — Condition of Affairs 
at Home — Arrival at Liverpool — Refusal to Speak — Visit to 
the Continent — Reception by the King of Belgium — Civil 
War discussed — News of Victories — Return to England 396-407 

- CHAPTER XX. 

Facing the Mob in Manchester — Glasgow — Edinburgh — Desperate 
Attempts to break Mr. Beecher down at Liverpool — Victory 
in London 408-442 

CHAPTER XXI. 

Close of the War — Distrust of the Administration — Kindlier Feel- 
ings after Mr. Beecher's Return from England — Growing Con- 
fidence — Intimacy with Secretary Stanton — Fort Sumter — 
Lee's Surrender — Lincoln's Death 443-456 

CHAPTER XXII. 

Reconstruction— Mr. Beecher favors speedy Readmission — Sol- 
diers' and Sailors' Convention at Cleveland— The "Cleveland 
Letters " cause great Excitement 457-478 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

The "Silver Wedding "of Plymouth Church— Children's Day- 
Services in the Church— Reunion of old Members— Histori- 
cal Reminiscences— Dr. Storrs's Tribute 479-487 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

The Conspiracy— Relations with Mr. Bowen— Disputes and Arbi- 
tration—Theodore Tilton's Early Promise and Intimacy with 
Mr. Beecher— Bowen's Ill-Will and Tilton's Malice— Tilton 
discharged from Independent and Brooklyn Union— Tripartite 
Agreement— Moulton and Tilton Conspire to Blackmail Mr. 
Beecher— Tilton consults Dr. Storrs 488-522 



CONTENTS. i i 



CHAPTER XXV. 

After-Effects — Charges against Tilton — Advisory Council — Inves- 
tigating Committee called by Mr. Beecher — Its Report — Drop- 
ping Mr. Moulton — Council called by Plymouth Church 523-536 

CHAPTER XXVI. 

After-Effects of the Conspiracy — Calling Council of 1876 — Princi- 
ple of Selection — Mr. Beecher cautions his Church — Bowen 
Reappears ; Proposes a Secret Tribunal — Mr. Beecher's Re- 
ply — Bowen Dropped by Plymouth Church — Deliverance of 
Council sustaining Plymouth — Mr. Beecher's Persecutors De- 
nounced— Special Tribunal 537-563 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

Rest and renewed Activity — Lecturing Tours — Resignation from 

the Congregational Association — Boston Criticisms 564-570 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

Attacking Corrupt Judges — Interest in Political Questions — 
Advocating Arthur's Renomination — Opposing Blaine — Sup- 
porting Cleveland — Campaign of 1884 — After the Battle 571—537 

CHAPTER XXIX. 

A Preacher — His Place — His Training — His Estimate of the 
Work — Defects — Effectual Call — Upon Drawing an Audience 
— His Theory — Preparation — Results — A Theologian — His 
Orthodoxy — Evol ution — Ordinances — Christian Unity — Sec- 
tarianism — Peacemaker 588-613 

CHAPTER XXX. 

Love of the Country — Communion with Nature — Farming at 

Salisbury — Lenox — Matteawan — The Peekskill Farm 614-638 

CHAPTER XXXI. 

Home Life — Love of Children — His Method of Training and Edu- 
cation — Formation of Library and Art Collection — Personal 
Traits 639-664 

CHAPTER XXXII. 

1886 — England Revisited — Speaking in the City Temple— West- 
minster Abbey — Lecturing through Great Britain — Addressing 
the Theological Students at City Temple—' 4 Life of Christ "— 
Sickness— Rest 665-683 

Appendix 687 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



PAGE 

1. Anvil and Oak Stump 18 

2. Foote Coat-of-Arms 21 

3. Church in which Lyman Beecher preached, in East Hampton, L. I. 28 

4. Beecher Residence at Litchfield 39 

5. Room in which Mr. Beecher was born 43 

6. Elms and Well which mark the Site of the " Beecher House" in 

Litchfield 45 

7. Facsimile of the first Letter of Mr. Beecher 50 

8. Ingersoll House = 73 

9. Stairs in Catharine Beecher's House in Hartford in 

10. Mr. Beecher at the time of his Marriage 168 

11. Mrs. Beecher at the time of her Marriage 169 

12. Church at Indianapolis Facing page 182 

13. Mr. Beecher's House at Indianapolis " " 202 

14. Mr. Beecher and his Father at time of Call to Brooklyn, " " 210 

15. Pinky's Freedom-Ring 295 

16. Mr. Beecher in 1850 367 

17. Mr. Beecher at the Close of the War 445 

18. Mr. Beecher and his Sister, Mrs. H. E. B. Stowe 525 

19. Cottage at Peekskill 619 

20. Old Apple-Tree 621 

21. Mr. Beecher on his Farm 625 

22. House at Peekskill 631 

23. Hall in New House at Peekskill 633 

24. Mr. and Mrs. Beecher at the time of Visit to England in 1886 667 

25. Lying in State in Plymouth Church 679 



PREFACE. 



A few months prior to his death our father undertook 
the preparation of his Autobiography. This was earnestly 
encouraged by his family, who shared with the public the 
desire that he should tell the tale of his life in his own 
words, giving those pictures of his inner self, the impressions 
made on him by his varying experiences, that he alone could 
give, and which, to a large extent, he alone knew. Con- 
fiding and free-spoken as he was in his joys, in his griefs 
he withdrew within himself, bearing in patient silence a 
load of sorrow unknown even to those nearest to him. 
But it was. not to be. He had only jotted down a rough 
outline of his plan, and written a part of an intermediate 
chapter, when he laid down his pen for a little rest, never 
to be resumed again. 

In his contract with our publishers but a single volume 
of not less than six hundred pages was contemplated. Un- 
conscious of its magnitude, we undertook to complete the 
contract. Accepting the limitations of a single volume, we 
began to collect the necessary material, and, when too late 
to change the form of the work, discovered that two volumes 
would hardly contain the history as it opened up to us, 
so closely interwoven has his life been with the nation's his- 
tory, and so full of important incidents. In the work of 
condensation, to bring our story within the space prescribed, 
we found it necessary to omit many of his letters, hoping 
that in the not far-distant future we might publish a sup- 
plemental volume containing all of his important correspon- 
dence. 

13 



14 PREFACE. 

The book before us we have sought, as far as possible, 
to make autobiographic, telling the tale in our father's words ; 
happily the many letters furnished us by friends, or retained 
in the family, his public writings and utterances, supplement- 
ed by the many personal reminiscences which he gave us at 
various times, has enabled us to do so to a large extent. 

We are fully conscious of the imperfect manner in which 
we have woven these quotations into our story ; the ordi- 
nary writer who attempts to connect with his words those 
glowing sentences white-hot with his fiery indignation against 
slavery, or his eloquent appeal to the English public for fair- 
dealing, or the brilliant play of wit and fancy in his more 
humorous utterances, can hope, at the most, to give but a 
respectable background that may aid by contrast. 

We have sought to make this book a truthful history 
from the beginnings of his life, through boyhood, manhood, 
and ripened age, to the end, omitting no important period, 
though passing innumerable incidents. 

A man loving peace, he reached peace only through war. 
From his early manhood he was called to meet in deadly 
combat the great sins of the nation. Through his life, at dif- 
ferent times, he met and overcame bitter and deadly assaults 
made upon him. 

In our narration of these events we have had no revenge 
to gratify nor theory to maintain. We have tried to give only 
facts, omitting deductions or conclusions, leaving each reader 
to draw his own inferences. If parts of our narrative bear 
hardly on any, it is only the pressure of the facts which can- 
not be suppressed in any fearless, truthful portrayal of our 
father's life. We do not make them ; we merely state them. 

We would acknowledge our indebtedness to the many 
friends who have kindly furnished letters and reminiscences, 
but especially to our mother, whose memory, running back 
along the paths they travelled for so many years together, 



PREFA CE. 



15 



has given to us much that never would otherwise have been 
known. 

If our readers get from a perusal of these pages a tithe 
of the comfort and inspiration which we have obtained from 
their preparation, we shall feel that our work has not been 
in vain. 

If they can see something of the fearlessness for right, 
the patience under unjust suffering, the inextinguishable love 
for fellow-men, and the abiding faith in God, that has been 
revealed by a study of his life even to us, who knew him 
best, we shall be satisfied. 

W. C. Beecher, 
Samuel Scoville. 

Brooklyn, March 12, 1888. 






CHAPTER I. 

Ancestry — Beecher — Ward — Foote — The Anvil — The Oak — Courtship and 
Marriage of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote — Home at East Hamp- 
ton, Long Island — Removal to Litchfield, Connecticut. 

HENRY WARD BEECHER used to say that the first thing 
for a man to do, if he would succeed in life, is to " choose 
a good father and mother to be born of." He himself 
was eminently wise, or fortunate, as the case may be, in this 
matter. 

" My earthly life," he says, " was given me by two of the best 
folks that ever lived on earth." His father, Lyman Beecher, was 
one of the leading preachers, reformers, and controversialists of 
his day. Sturdy in body and mind, full of sensibility, aflame 
with enthusiasm, devoted to the highest aims and utterly unself- 
ish in life, a Christian in whom deep spirituality and strong 
common sense were happily blended, he was just the man to 
transmit excellent qualities to his children; a father to be en- 
joyed while living, and to be remembered with love and rever- 
ence after his death. 

Of him his son says : " While he was eloquent and among 
the foremost speakers of his day, I remember particularly that 
I never heard from him a word of uncharitableness, nor saw 
a symptom of envy or jealousy, or aught else but the most en- 
thusiastic love of men, and of young men and young ministers ; 
and knowing him in the household, I have yet to know another 
person that was so devoid of the inferior feelings and so eminent 
in the topmost feelings of human nature." 

Lyman's father's name was David, a well-read, clear-headed 
man, with decided opinions upon the questions of the day ; one 
with whom Roger Sherman delighted, upon his return from Con- 
gress, to talk over the business of the session and discuss public 
affairs. He kept college students as boarders, that he might en- 
joy their conversation, and made himself proficient in many of 
their studies. Of him his son said : " If he had received a regu- 
lar education he would have been equal to anybody." He was 

17 



i8 



BIOGRAPHY OF 



both blacksmith and farmer, and had the reputation of " raising 
the nicest rye and making the best hoes in New England." 

Lyman Beecher's mother was a Lyman, a woman " of a joy- 
ous, sparkling, hopeful temperament." Her grandfather was a 
Scotchman, thus giving a little Gaelic blood to the veins of her 
descendants. In his autobiography Lyman Beecher says : 4< She 
died of consumption two days after I was born. I was a seven- 
months child, and When the woman that attended on her saw 
what a puny thing I was, and that the mother could not live, she 
thought it useless to attempt to keep me alive. I was actu- 
ally wrapped up and laid aside. But after a while one of the 
women thought she would look and see if I were living, and, find- 




The Anvil and Oak Stump. 



ing I was, concluded to wash and dress me, saying : ' It's a pity 
he hadn't died with his mother.' So you see it was but by a 
hair's-breadth I got a foothold in this world." He was taken in 
charge by " Aunt Benton " and brought up on his uncle Lot Ben- 
ton's farm in North "Guilford, where farm-work and farm-fare 
made him strong. 

Their intention was to make a farmer of him ; but the intoler- 
able slowness of an ox-team, in ploughing fifteen acres of summer 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 



*9 



fallow three times over in a single season, so disgusted the lad 
that he became restless. His uncle saw it, and upon consultation 
with the father they decided to send him to school to prepare 
for Yale College, which was accordingly done. He often said, 
" Oxen sent me to college." 

David's father's name was Nathaniel. He was also a black- 
smith, and the anvil of both father and son stood upon the stump 
of that old oak under which John Davenport preached his first 
sermon to the New Haven Colony. He married a Sperry, " a 
pious woman," whose mother was a Roberts from Forlallt, Car- 
diganshire, Wales. From her, his great- great-grandmother, came 
the fervid Welsh blood with which Henry Ward was always so 
well pleased. 

Joseph was the father of Nathaniel. His father's name was 
John, of whom tradition says that he was one of those who in the 
fall of 1637 accompanied Samuel Eaton in his explorations for a 
suitable location for the colony of John Davenport, that had just 
come over and was then staying at Boston ; and that he was one 
of the very few men who lived through the winter in the poor hut 
that had been built at " Quinnipiack," New Haven, that they 
might pre-empt the territory and be in readiness to welcome the 
colony in the following spring. 

He was the only son of Hannah Beecher, whose husband, 
born in Kent, England, died just before the colony sailed. She 
was about to abandon the enterprise, but, being a midwife and 
likely to be of service to the youthful colony, they promised her 
her husband's share in the town plot if she would come. They 
kept their word, and it was in her lot that the historic oak just 
mentioned stood. 

Her business seems not to have been remarkably lucrative, 
for at her death her estate inventoried only ^55 5s. 6d. 

One earlier mention of the family was found by Mr. Beecher 
in the British Museum during his visit to England in 1863, and 
copied in his diary : 

"Visitation of Kent, 16,279 Brit. Museum. 

"Henry Beecher, alderman and sheriff of London 1570, 
ob't 1571." 

Apparently of more than the average intellectual ability of 
their class, there was one feature in which the men whom we have 
described markedly excelled — namely, in their physical strength. 



20 BIOGRAPHY OF 

The standard of measurement was peculiar to those early times, 
and may not be as well understood by us ; yet it even now con- 
veys the idea of great stalwartness. David, it was said, could 
lift a barrel of cider and carry it into the cellar ; Nathaniel, his 
father, was not quite as strong, yet he could throw a barrel of 
cider into a cart; while Joseph exceeded them all, for he could lift 
the barrel and drink out of the bung-hole. Of Henry, the sheriff, 
no description has been found. 

There was one especial feature of degeneracy in these mod- 
ern days, compared with the good old times of the fathers, over 
which Henry Ward, when Mrs. Beecher was just within earshot, 
moaned and groaned. His grandfather, he said, had five wives, 
his father had three, but such was the meagreness of these penu- 
rious times in which he lived, and the persistence of the Bullard 
blood, that he saw no chance for himself to have more than one. 
But afterwards, lest she should feel hurt at his raillery, he writes 
her with many expressions of affection, in a letter dated March 
31, 1872: 'It has always been a shadow over the future to fear 
that I should walk alone the few remaining years of my life, 
for alone I shall be if you go from me. In jest we have often 
spoken of other connections. But such a thing is the remotest 
of possibilities. Should you go no one would ever take your 
place." 

Such was the ancestry selected on the father's side. Six gen- 
erations, without question, are known to us, reaching from the 
hills of Litchfield, in Connecticut, to the chalk-cliffs of Kent, 
England. For that distance we can trace the family stream up 
to its sources in the great body of the English common people, 
in that county most characteristic of England, where the Roman 
had first struggled with the Briton, where the " free-necked 
men," under Hengist and Horsa, had first made a lodgment on 
English soil, and near which was Hastings and the fields of the 
Norman conquest, and where, perhaps more than in any other 
county, mingled those different strains of blood, Briton, Roman, 
Saxon, Northmen, Scots, and Picts, out of which has come Eng- 
land's strength and England's greatness. We find all of them of 
the yeomanry, all of them honest, useful, God-fearing men, fit to 
be the progenitors of one who delighted in nothing more than 
in his common experiences with common people, and valued 
nothing more highly than their confidence and friendship. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 



21 



Nor would it be difficult to find in the sturdy independence 
and quaint humor of these men of the anvil and the plough, the 
origin of much of that robust and humorous manliness which 
made Henry Ward Beecher so conspicuous in his day and gen- 
eration. 

His power to strike heavy blows and to hit the nail on the 
head was partly inherited, and that anvil-ring of the fathers has 
been often heard in these latter days under his sledge-hammer 
strokes. If the iron were not hot, he heated it by striking, and 
sparks flew, and men's hearts and minds were moulded and weld- 
ed before he was done. 

More than this, there appears in him something of the love 
of the "shield-game" and the "sword-play" of those earlier 
generations that were " at heart fighters," and something also of 
the sadness and heroism which led them to say, u Each man of us 
shall abide the end of his life- 
work ; let him that may, work his 
doomed deeds ere death come." 

On the mother's side the se- 
lection was somewhat different. 
While we find no more sterling 
qualities, there is in this line a 
higher social position, more cul- 
ture, a broader training in pub- 
lic affairs, both civil and military, 
and what with some may appear 
of still greater importance, a coat- 
of-arms given as a special mark 
of royal gratitude. 

Roxana Foote had gentle 
blood in her veins. She could 
trace her genealogy on the fa- 
ther's side back through Natha- 
niel Foote, who came into Con- 
necticut with Hooker's company 
in 1636, to James Foote, an officer 
in the English army, who aided 
King Charles to conceal himself 

in the " Royal Oak " and was knighted for his loyalty 
the old primer has it : 




As 



2 2 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" It was the tree, the old oak-tree, 
Which saved his royal majesty." 

The tree stood in a field of clover, and the Foote coat-of-arms 
still bears an oak for its crest and a clover-leaf in its quarterings, 
with the motto " Loyalty and Truth." 

Her mother, Roxana Ward Foote, was descended from 
Andrew Ward, who came over with Sir Richard Saltonstall and 
settled in Watertown, Mass., in 1630. 

He afterwards moved to Wethersfield, and was a member of 
the first General Court, or Legislature, held at Hartford in 1636. 
Later he moved to Stamford, and represented that colony in the 
higher branch of the General Court at New Haven. 

From him descended Colonel Andrew Ward, who took part 
in the old French and Indian war and aided in the capture of 
Louisburg in 1745. Of him it is told that, being a stanch cold- 
water man, he took money in lieu of his daily rations of grog. 
With this he bought six silver spoons, on which he had engraved 
the name " Louisburg." Some of these spoons are still preserved 
in the family, witnesses to the virtue and valor of one of its hon- 
ored ancestors. 

His son was General Andrew Ward, of Revolutionary fame, 
who, at the close of the war, went back to his native town, Guil- 
ford, and took up his residence upon a farm of about two hun- 
dred acres, called Nutplains. For many years he represented 
the town in the State Legislature, being nominated, it is said, year 
after year by some one of the town worthies in this primitive 
manner : " The meeting is now open, and you will proceed to 
vote for General Ward and Deacon Burgess for representatives." 

When his daughter, an only child, who had married Eli Foote, 
was left a widow, he took her with her ten children to his home 
at Nutplains, and cared for them as if they were his own. Being 
a great reader, and always bringing home with him from the 
Legislature his saddle-bags full of books, which were read aloud 
and discussed in the family, this home became a school that 
afforded superior advantages for gaining acquaintance with litera- 
ture, for acquiring such knowledge of science as was accessible 
at that time, and for exciting thought and interest. In that 
school Roxana, the second-born of the family, is represented to 
have been easily first both in intellect and goodness. 

Taking her part in the labor of the household at a time when 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 2$ 

it was expected that the woman portion would not only care for 
the house, prepare the food, and make the clothes for all the 
family, but also weave and spin the materials as well, she yet 
managed to acquire an education of which graduates of our 
modern schools and colleges might well be proud. " She studied 
while she spun flax, tying her books to the distaff." She not 
only became well read in literature and history, and acquainted 
with the progress of science, then just beginning to attract the 
attention of scholars, but learned to write and speak the French 
language fluently. She gave enough attention to music to be 
able to accompany her voice on the guitar, and was sufficiently 
skilled in the use of pencil and brush to paint some very credita- 
ble portraits upon ivory, several of which are still in the family. 
She was an adept in the mysteries of the needle, " in fine em- 
broidery with every variety of lace and cobweb stitch," and was 
gifted with great skill and celerity in all manner of handicraft, so 
that in after-years " neither mantua-maker, tailoress, or milliner 
ever drew on the family treasury." 

Belonging to a family distinguished in both branches of her 
ancestry, and residing, while her father lived, in the centre of the 
village of Guilford, which could boast that more than four-fifths 
of its original population belonged to families with coats-of- 
arms in Great Britain, and afterwards taken to the home of her 
grandfather, General Ward, who was the foremost man of the 
town and one of the leading men in the State, and who kept 
■open house to all strangers, she enjoyed the best social advan- 
tages which the times afforded. 

Tall and beautiful in form and feature, with a winning and yet 
commanding presence, " she was so sensitive and of so great 
natural timidity that she never spoke in company or before stran- 
gers without blushing, and was absolutely unable in after-life to 
•conform to the standard of what was expected of a pastor's wife 
and lead the devotions in the weekly female prayer-meeting." 

She was early confirmed in the Episcopal Church ; her par- 
ents, although both from strictly Puritan families, having joined 
that denomination upon their marriage. They had held through 
all the Revolutionary struggle to their loyalty to King George, 
and this had subjected them to the determined opposition of 
their neighbors, and stamped the family, perhaps, with something 
of that independence of character which opposition to a pre- 



L^" 



24 BIOGRAPHY OF 

vailing popular sentiment is adapted to give, and which is so 
marked a feature in her descendants. 

Converted when she was but five years old, and scarcely- 
remembering the time when she did not go with her joys and 
sorrows to God in prayer, and next to the oldest in a family of 
ten children, her mother a widow, and all dependent upon the 
grandfather, she early learned that patience, self-control, effi- 
ciency, and unselfishness that characterized her through life and 
left in her old home at Nutplains, as Mrs. Stowe tells us, tradi- 
tions like these : " Your mother never spoke an angry word in 
her life." "Your mother never told a lie." And from the 
husband such a testimony as this : " She experienced resigna- 
tion, if any one ever did. I never saw the like, so entire, without 
reservation or shadow of turning. In no exigency was she taken 
by surprise. She was just there, quiet as an angel from above. I 
never heard a murmur ; and if ever there was a perfect mind as 
respects submission, it was hers. I never witnessed a movement 
of the least degree of selfishness ; and if there ever was any such 
thing in the world as disinterestedness, she had it." 

No one reading her history will think that Henry Ward 
exaggerated when, speaking of her and her influence upon him, 
he said : " There are few born into this world that are her 
equals. She was a woman of extraordinary graces and gifts ; a 
woman not demonstrative, with a profound philosophical nature, 
of a wonderful depth of affection, and with a serenity that was 
simply charming. From her I received my love of the beautiful, 
my poetic temperament ; from her also I received simplicity and 
childlike faith in God." 

And again : " My communion with nature arose from the 
mother in me. Because my mother was an inspired woman, who 
saw God in nature as really as in the Book, and she bestowed 
that temperament upon me, and I came gradually to feel that, 
aside from God as revealed in the past, there was a God with an 
everlasting present around about me." 

With these elements of a more personal nature also appear 
certain family traits. As we saw how, from the father's side, the 
old anvil was constantly- making itself heard in the strong, sturdy 
qualities of the Beecher stock, so shall we see features from the 
ancestry on the mother's side coming to him almost unchanged. 
The loyalty represented by the oak-tree, and the virtue displayed 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 



25 



at Louisburg, will constantly show themselves. Who that has 
seen him standing, now for the black man in the face of the 
adverse popular sentiment of his time in obedience to his 
own convictions of right, now governing his political actions 
by the same authority, and anon following his religious convic- 
tions wherever they led him, can have failed to see, in him, the 
oak-tree standing in the clover-field with the motto written upon 
its shield, in letters of light, "Loyalty and Truth " ? In his con- 
stant advocacy of reform, in his early and strenuous opposition to 
intemperance, appears " Louisburg " again, written this time, not 
upon silver, but upon life and character — the Ward and the 
Foote families showing in him the characteristics they had won. 

More than this, probably no lines could better illustrate the 
New England race-elements, the union of its democracy and its 
gentry, the sturdy independence of its homes and its native ability 
in war and peace, its intellectual and its spiritual independence, 
its quaint humor and its shrewd common sense, than those that 
united in him from both the parental roots. 

He was a natural product of the New England stock, tem- 
pered and sweetened by the broader traditions of the more aristo- 
cratic blood of the Cavalier, of New England institutions and 
New England character. And since New England, thus enriched, 
illustrates the whole land, and by reason of the diffusion of her 
blood has made her characteristics national, he was a typical 
American, standing with unusual ability and conscientiousness 
where every true American feels that he ought to stand — for 
right and liberty. This, we doubt not, was in part the ground of 
his national popularity and influence ; he was felt to be so 
thoroughly American. He represented us as do our national col- 
ors and our battle-flags, and we were proud of him, grew enthusi- 
astic over him, and men that never saw him loved him. And 
since these characteristics are but the product of English institu- 
tions and the putting forth of Anglo-Saxon tendencies which were 
always advancing, always protesting against some old abuse, and 
always seeking the recognition of some right — now at Runny- 
mede among the barons, and now at Westminster among the 
Commons ; now taking up the question of negro-slavery, and 
now the Irish question ; always hopeful, expectant, progres- 
sive — and America is but, as he claimed, " the better England 
transplanted," and he but " an Englishman from a broader 



26 BIOGRAPHY OF 

England," a continental instead of an insular one, he was hailed 
by all the English-speaking people as belonging to them as do 
King Alfred and Shakspere. 

As we go on we shall find many other influences at work — 
influences of nature, of books, of college and profession ; but 
thus early we can see that, more than of any and all the rest, 
Henry Ward Beecher was the product of New England parent- 
age, full-veined with English traditions and race characteristics. 

The courtship of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote took 
place in 1798. It was marked by the interpenetration of reli- 
gious sentiment and earthly love, and was a true preparation for 
home-making, and of such a home as should help to form the 
remarkable personality of H. W. Beecher. 

The letters that passed between them during this year give 
evidence of the strong love of those who, while having still upon 
them the dew of their youth, have each found in the other the 
chosen mate — a love than which earth has no more influential nor 
beautiful thing to give. They also show us the two akin in 
intellectual powers and pursuits, and equally enjoying the trea- 
sures which the world of letters opened to them. But most 
prominent of all matters referred to in these letters are religious 
questions and personal religious experiences. They revolve 
around " the evidences " and similar subjects with an absorption 
of interest that must seem almost incomprehensible to modern 
lovers. In the perfect and unrestrained communion of heart 
with heart these two speak of the sweet and wonderful expe- 
riences that they have enjoyed from the presence of the Lord, 
share their common hopes and anticipations of the coming glory 
of the Redeemer's kingdom, and strive to help one another to a 
better understanding of the best things of God. Such thoughts 
and efforts as these undoubtedly went far toward laying the 
foundation of that " intimacy that existed throughout the whole 
range of their being," and for that deep and unswerving regard 
and confidence which each cherished for the other until death. 
She rested upon him, and he always looked upon her as intellec- 
tually and morally the stronger and better portion of himself. 
The very differences -in their nature and education contributed 
to this large and beautiful unity and confidence. While re- 
sembling each other in many things, in others they were the 
complements of each other. He was quick and impulsive, she, 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



27 



perfectly serene and self-poised. He was logical, she was intui- 
tive as well. He was of the Independents, she was an Episco- 
palian. From such a union, so sincere and broad, we may 
expect a happy home. 

Judging from these letters, we should say also that whenever 
these two shall build their home they will build it strong and 
high. Not only will love be there, with all its attractions, and 
intellect with its stimulus and power, but the grand things of 
heaven will be builded into it. And wherever it shall be es- 
tablished, whether by the sea-shore at East Hampton or among 
the hills of Litchfield, it will have a broad horizon ; it will look 
out upon something wider and deeper than the sea and higher 
than the mountains. The high things of God will always be 
kept in view ; His broad, deep, measureless purposes will be 
held within the range of its contemplation, and His presence will 
be felt in shaping its policy and in giving vitality to its atmos- 
phere. 

From such a home we shall expect children that shall have 
power in the world. 

They were married at Nutplains, September 19, 1799. 

" Roxana's friends were all present and all my folks from 
New Haven." . . . " Nobody ever married more heart and hand 
than we." Then came the packing up; "the candle-stand, 
bureau, clothing, bedding, linen, and stuffs generally," and the 
going over by sloop to Long Island. 

Their life in East Hampton, Long Island, was that of two 
who believed, without one shadow of doubt, in their call of God, 
and who took up their work, not only with the firm grasp of duty, 
but with the enthusiasm of devout, self-sacrificing love. Their 
faith was tested by his long-continued sickness, by the death of 
one of their children, and by the numerous discouragements of a 
country minister ; but it stood the test, deepening and brighten- 
ing under trial. 

It was a barren place to which they had come, but Lyman 
Beecher brought such vigorous faith and added to it such en- 
thusiastic labors, now in the home church, now in the school- 
houses of the surrounding districts, and now among the Indians 
at Montauk Point, that he made the whole district fruitful. The 
field was a narrow one, but by the interest awakened by his 
sermons, especially the one upon duelling called forth by the 



28 



BIOGRAPHY OF 



death of Alexander Hamilton from the pistol of Aaron Burr, he 
broadened it until his parish stretched across the Atlantic. 




Church in whrch Rev. Lyman Beecher preached, in East Hampton, L. I, 



The wants of a young family made some effort necessary to 
eke out the meagre salary of four hundred dollars, and a school 
for girls was decided upon, to be kept by Mrs. Beecher. It was 
successful in every respect but financially, and moderately so in* 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 



2 9 



that ; but it did not bring the relief that was sought, and there 
•came a necessity to change for a field where sufficient salary 
•could be had to support the family without the harassments of 
other and unpastoral labors. 

A marked providence, as it seemed to Mr. Beecher, opened 
the way to his preaching on trial in Litchfield, Connecticut. He 
made a good impression ; the people were unanimous and eager 
in their call ; the Presbytery gave its consent ; and now, without 
a doubt that it is according to the will of God, the decision 
is made, and the home which had first been planted within 
the sound of the ocean surf at East Hampton, Long Island, in 
1799, was transplanted to the quiet inland village of Litchfield 
in 1810. 



CHAPTER II. 

Litchfield — Situation — Natural Features — Early Settlers — Social and Moral 
Advantages — Patriotism — North Street Described — The Beecher 
Home — Birth of Henry Ward — The Times at Home and Abroad — 
His Birth-Mark. 

AS Henry Ward was perfectly satisfied with the parents that 
bore him, so he was with the place in which he was born. 
" Surely old Litchfield," he says, " was a blessed place 
for one's birth and childhood. Although there were no moun- 
tains, there were hills, the oldest-born of mountains, high, round, 
and innumerable. Great trees there were, full of confidences 
with the wind that chastised them in winter and kissed and ca- 
ressed them all the summer." 

The hills referred to were " Prospect " and " Mount Tom " on 
the west, "Chestnut Hill " on the east, and others like them but 
unnamed — the " high, round, and innumerable " ones of which 
he speaks, and which together formed, with their sloping sides 
and valleys between, that broad and irregular plateau of elevated 
land, extending for miles on either side, in the midst of which 
the village of Litchfield is situated. A country of hills, with that 
wide and picturesque horizon which only such a landscape can 
furnish, where the irregular outline appears as walls and watch- 
towers for the protection of the home territory, with here and 
there an open door, through which the imagination of youth or 
the feet of maturer years may pass out into the great world of 
sunshine or of cloud beyond. 

Litchfield Hill itself, on which the village stands, is more than 
a thousand feet above sea-level, " high and broad-backed," and 
belongs, with all its fellows, to the Green Mountain range, which, 
beginning near the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sweeps in an irregular 
curve to the seaboard -at Long Island Sound, the back-bone of 
this great New England peninsula. 

High enough to be breezy and healthy, but not so high as to 
be unfertile, and sloping to the south, it afforded then, as now, all 

3^ 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



3* 



the inducements for residence which sun, soil, pure air, and a 
beautiful landscape could furnish. 

Lakes, without which no landscape is perfect, were added : 
Little Pond to the southwest, and Big Bantam Lake beyond, were 
the ones that were visible from the village, out of a large number 
that can be found in the township ; but the Sawmill Pond, where 
Henry Ward caught his first fish, with an alder-stick for a pole 
and a bent pin for a hook — caught it so thoroughly that it was 
dashed in pieces upon the rocks behind him — has disappeared 
with the tearing away of the dam that held it. 

Brooks ran down between the hills and sang their way through 
the meadows, each one offering some new feature to the land- 
scape, and each a field of new discovery for inquisitive youth. 

Woods, made up of every variety of tree and shrub native 
to our latitude, where nuts grew and all kinds of small game 
abounded, where crows and now and then a hen-hawk built their 
nests, were in easy reach upon the slopes of the hills both to the 
west and east. Ledges of rock to the north were the lair of 
wildcats, a vermin so numerous seventy-five years ago as to be a 
serious pest to the farmers ; and stone walls, where woodchucks 
retreated from the clover-fields and thought themselves safe, 
were the usual division-fences for the fields. 

There were other things that were equally pleasing to a boy's 
fancy, and perhaps equally influential in his education. The 
lakes, streams, and forests of the town had been the favorite fish- 
ing and hunting ground of the Indians ; arrow-heads were occa- 
sionally picked up on the lake shore or turned up by the plough- 
share upon the hillside ; and, best of all, Mount Tom was one 
of the series of stations where blazed the signal-fires which the 
Indians of this region built to warn their brethren of the whole 
territory between the Housatonic and Naugatuck rivers of the 
approach of their enemies, the fierce Mohawks. 

Litchfield, in short, was the paradise of a birth-place for any 
boy. It was paradise, school-house, gymnasium, church, and ca- 
thedral to Henry Ward Beecher. In it he experienced his sweet- 
est pleasures, learned his best lessons, gained control of his pow- 
ers, and offered his first worship. He breathed its pure air, 
climbed its rocks, wandered in its woods, wrestled with its winter 
storms, and in this way laid the foundation for that superb 
health for which he was remarkable through life. 



3* 



BIOGRAPHY OF 



With the hunger and inquisitiveness of a growing boy, he 
searched nature's storehouse of fruits and nuts, which opens with 
the wintergreen plums and squaw-berries of the melting snow- 
time of spring, and continues, a house of plenty for all that know 
her secrets — partridges, squirrels, and boys — until the snow covers 
the ground in December, and so gained that habit of investiga- 
tion into the things of nature, and of close observation, that dis- 
tinguished him ever after. 

He lay on the ground and looked up into the blue sky and the 
moving tree-tops for hours together, and listened to the voices 
of spring-time and eventide, and in this way, as he tells us, re- 
ceived the first distinct religious impressions that he remembered. 
His nature, which seemed closed almost to the verge of stupidity 
to the rules of syntax and the answers in the Westminster Cate- 
chism, was wide open and receptive to all the processes and in- 
fluences of nature around him. He drank them in, and they be- 
came not only a vast storehouse of facts and images to which he 
resorted in after-life for illustrations, but, even more than that, a 
very part of himself. The tree that so often appeared in his 
sermons was made from those up whose trunks he had climbed, 
in whose shade he had lain, and to the whisperings of whose 
leaves he had listened in boyhood. The spring which so often 
served in illustrating spiritual truths was but the description of 
those that burst out from the foot of Chestnut or of Prospect 
Hill, and the flowers so frequently referred to in the pulpit or in 
private conversation were such as he had grown familiar with by 
the roadside, in the meadows or the forests of his country home. 
The moving of the great cloud-shadows across the fields of Litch- 
field, the blue of its skies, the reddening of its mornings and the 
gold of its sunsets, the flash of its sunlight upon the lake, its 
wealth of apple-blossoms, the exquisite beauty of its violets hid- 
den away in fence-corners, the grace of its elm-branches, the rug- 
gedness of its oaks, the strength of its rocks, the soft catkins 
of its willows, its meadow flower-garden of clover, daisy, and 
buttercup, the gorgeousness of its forests in autumn, the gurgle 
of its brooks, the song of its birds, the plaintive voices of its twi- 
light, the gentle breathings of its August winds and the fierce 
rattle of its December storms, were all absorbed by his receptive 
nature and continually reappeared in his writings and talk of 
after-years. They added the grace and beauty native to them 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 



33 



to all that he wrote or spoke, and were in part the secret of that 
charm in his words which attached and interested all alike. 
They did more than this : they prepared him to be an interpre- 
ter of nature to others, and, when he had become equally well 
equipped with a rich spiritual experience, they fitted him, as we 
shall see farther on, to be the reconciler of a spiritual faith and a 
material science. 

It was not an unimportant thing, but one of God's beautiful 
provisions,' that Henry Ward Beecher was born in Litchfield, 
where there is more of nature to the square foot, as .we believe, 
than in any other place on the globe ; to learn his first lessons in 
the beautiful school of her flowers, birds, brooks, meadows, j:>as- 
ture lands, hill-tops, and forests. 

" Dear old Litchfield ! I love thee still, even if thou didst 
me the despite of pushing me into life upon thy high and windy 
hilltop ! Where did the spring ever break forth more joyously 
and sing at escaping from winter, as the children of Israel did 
when that woman's-rights Miriam chanted her song of victory ? 
Where did the torrid summer ever find a lovelier place in which 
to cool its beams ? What trees ever murmured more gently 
to soft winds, or roared more lion-like when storms were 
abroad ? 

" It was there that we learned to fish, to ride a horse alone, to 
do the barn chores, to cut and split wood, to listen at evening to 
the croaking frogs and whistling tree-toads, to go to meeting and 
go to sleep, to tear holes in new clothes ; there we learned to hoe, 
to mow away hay, to weed onions, to stir up ministers' horses 
with an unusual speed when ridden to water; there we went 
a-wandering up and down forest-edges, and along the crooked 
brooks in flower-pied meadows, dreaming about things not to be 
found in any catechism." 

Equally marked was Litchfield at that day for its social and 
moral as for its natural advantages. Its early settlers, mostly 
from the excellent stock from which the colonies of Hartford 
and Windsor were formed, were men of broad and liberal mould, 
and began their work upon this hilltop in a characteristic fashion. 
They laid out their streets and staked off the village common 
with such generous breadth that they remain the delight of resi- 
dents and the admiration of strangers to this day. They made 
such liberal provision for education and religion that the settle- 



34 BIOGRAPHY OF 

ment soon became noted for the excellency of its schools and the 
commanding influence of its pulpit.* 

The law-school of Judges Reeve and Gould, and the young 
ladies' school of the Misses Pierce, made it an educational centre 
scarcely second in the breadth of its influence to any in the land, 
and attracted a class of residents of high social position. 

Its courts gathered from time to time some of the leading 
members of the bar from the whole country, not for a few hours, 
as now with our railroad facilities, but for days and weeks to- 
gether. AH these things helped to create a very high order of 
public spirit — that force which, often wholly unregarded, is yet so 
powerful in moulding the character and giving direction to the life. 

One other element in this communal influence must not be 
omitted — its intense patriotism. From the beginning to the 
close of the Revolutionary struggle the records of the county 
of Litchfield are stamped with the evidence of the most enthu- 
siastic loyalty to the cause of the struggling colonies. At the 
time of the Boston Port Bill, Litchfield had forwarded a liberal 
contribution for the aid of the poor of that city. When the 
equestrian statue of King George, of gilded lead, was missing 
from the Bowling Green in New York, it was shortly found in 
the dwelling-house of Oliver Wolcott in this village, was melted 
down by his daughters and their friends, and furnished forty 
thousand bullets, which were sent to our soldiers in the field, to 
be afterwards forwarded by them, from the muzzles of their 
muskets, to the king's Hessians, with the hissing compliments of 
the American colonies. 

No town excelled her in the proportionate number or quality 
of the men she sent into the field (at one time every able-bodied 
man in the town being, it is said, at the front), nor in the suffer- 
ing and loss which they endured. Thirty out of a company 



* Out of sixty-four allotments into which the town was divided, one 
was to be given to the first minister, to be his and descend to his heirs 
for ever; a second was to be reserved for the use of the minister during his 
ministry, and a third was reserved for the benefit of a school. While as 
yet three houses, one in the centre of the present village, and one on 
either side a mile distant, were picketed and garrisoned for protection 
against the Indians, and while there were but sixty adult male inhabitants, 
they built their first church edifice, with a Sabbath-Day House for the better 
accommodation of the people. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 



5 



of thirty-six who surrendered at Fort Washington, New York, 
"died miserable deaths from cold, hunger, thirst, suffocation, 
disease, and the vilest cruelties from those to whom they had sur- 
rendered on a solemn promise of honorable treatment." This 
had made Ethan Allen, a native of this village, and, as is well 
known, a professed infidel, grind his teeth and exclaim: " My 
faith in my creed is shaken; there ought to be a hell for such 
infernal scoundrels as that Lowrie," the officer in charge of the 
prisoners. Nor were these days so remote that their influence 
was unfelt. In 1810 the spirit of '76 was not seriously dimin- 
ished, and many of the principal actors in the stirring scenes of 
the Revolutionary struggle were still alive. Colonel Tallmadge, 
one of the most dashing and able cavalry officers of the army, 
Governor Oliver Wolcott, Jr., a member of Washington's cabi- 
net, and many other soldiers of the Revolution and actors of 
less note, were residents of the village at the time of the coming 
here of Lyman Beecher. When we note the burning patriotism 
which was always so marked a characteristic of Henry Ward, 
we must remember that he drank it in in his youth from its 
primitive sources among the old soldiers of Litchfield. 

We give his description of the village as it appeared to him 
in his childhood, although a part of it is out of chronological 
order. It is found in an article entitled " Litchfield Revisited," 
written in 1856: 

' The morning after our arrival in Litchfield we sallied forth 
alone. The day was high and wide, full of stillness, and serene- 
ly radiant. As we carried our present life up the North Street 
we met at every step our boyhood life coming down. There 
were the old trees, but looking not so large as to our young eyes. 
The stately road had, however, been bereaved of the buttonball 
trees, which had been crippled by disease. But the old elms re- 
tained a habit peculiar to Litchfield. There seemed to be a cur- 
rent of wind which at times passes high up in the air over the 
town, and which moves the tops of the trees, while on the 
ground there is no movement of wind. How vividly did that 
sound from above bring back early days, when for hours we 
lay upon the windless grass and watched the top leaves flutter, 
and marked how still were the under leaves of the same tree ! 

" One by one came the old houses. On the corner stood and 
stands the jail — awful building to young sinners ! We never 



36 BIOGRAPHY OF 

passed its grated windows without a salutary chill. The old 
store, and same old name, Buell, on it ; the bank, and its long, 
lean legs spindling up to hold the shelf up under the roof ! The 
Colonel Tallmadge house, that used to seem so grand that it was 
cold, but whose cherry-trees in the front yard seemed warm 
enough and attractive to our longing lips and watery mouths. 
How well do we remember the stately gait of the venerable col- 
onel of Revolutionary memory ! We don't recollect that he ever 
spoke to us or greeted us; not because he was austere or unkind,, 
but from a kind of military reserve. We thought him good and 
polite, but should as soon have thought of climbing the church- 
steeple as of speaking to one living so high and venerable above 
all boys ! 

" Then came Judge Gould's ! Did we not remember that 
and the faces that used to illuminate it ? The polished and 
polite judge, the sons and daughters, the little office in the yard, 
the successive classes of law students that received that teaching 
which has since so often honored both bar and bench. Here, 
too, we stopped to retrace the very place where, being set on by 
a fiery young Southern blood, without any cause that we knew 
of then or can remember now, we undertook to whip one of 
Judge Gould's sons, and did not do it. We were never satisfied 
with the result, and think if the thing could be reviewed now it 
might turn out differently. 

" There, too, stood Dr. Catlin's house, looking as if the rubs 
of time had polished it instead of injuring. Next there seemed 
to our puzzled memory a vacancy. Ought there not to be about 
there a Holmes house, to which we used to go and get baskets 
of Virgaloo pears, and were inwardly filled, as a satisfying method 
of keeping us honest toward the pears in the basket ? 

" But Dr. Sheldon's house is all right. Dear old Dr. Shel- 
don ! We began to get well as soon as he came into the house ; 
or, if the evil spirit delayed a little, ' Cream-o'-tartar with hot 
water poured upon it and sweetened ' finished the work. He 
had learned, long before the days of homoeopathy, that a doctor's 
chief business is to keep parents from giving their children medi- 
cine, so that nature may have a fair chance at the disease with- 
out having its attention divided or diverted. 

" But now we stop before Miss Pierce's — a name known in 
thousands of families, where gray-headed mothers remember the 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



37 



soft and gentle days of Litchfield schooling. The fine residence 
is well preserved, and time has been gentle within likewise. But 
the school-house is gone, and she that for so many years kept it 
busy is gone, and the throng that have crossed its threshold 
brood the whole globe with offices of maternal love. The 
Litchfield Law School in the days of Judge Tapping Reeve and 
Judge Gould, and Miss Pierce's Female School, were in their day 
two very memorable institutions, and, though since supplied by 
others upon a larger scale, there are few that will have performed 
so much, if we take into account the earliness of the times and 
the fact that they were pioneers and parents of those that have 
supplanted them. But they are gone, the buildings moved off, 
and the ground smoothed and soft to the foot with green grass. 
No more shall the setting sun see Litchfield streets thronged with 
young gentlemen and ladies, and filling the golden air with laugh- 
ter or low converse which, unlaughing then, made life musical 
for ever after ! 

" But where is the Brace house ? An old red house — red once, 
but picked by the winds and washed by rains till the color was 
neutral, thanks to the elements. The old elm-trees guard the 
spot, a brotherhood as noble as these eyes have ever seen, lifted 
high up, and in the part nearest heaven locking their arms to- 
gether and casting back upon their separate trunks an undi- 
vided shade. So are many, separate in root and trunk, united 
far up by their heaven-touching thoughts and affections. 

" Mrs. Lord's house is the only one now before we reach our 
own native spot. This, too, holds its own and is fertile in mem- 
ories. Across the way lived Sheriff Landon, famous for dry wit 
and strong politics. 

" But south of him lived the greatest man in town, Mr. Par- 
ker, who owned the stages ; and the wittiest man in town, with us 
boys, was Hiram Barnes, that drove stage for him ! To be sure, 
neither of them was eminent for learning or civil influence, but, 
in that temple which boys' imaginations make, a stage proprietor 
and a stage-driver stand forth as grand as Minerva in the Par- 
thenon ! 

" But there are houses on the other side. The eastern side 
of Litchfield North Street, like the eastern side of Broadway, 
was never so acceptable to fashion, albeit some memorable 
names lived there. It was our good fortune to be born on the 



$8 REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 

west side of the street. We know not what blessings must have 
descended upon us from having been born on the fashionable 
side ; one shudders to think how near he escaped being born on 
the other, the east side of the street." 

Into this village Lyman Beecher brought his family in 1810. 
The dwelling had been described by himself : " The house I 
shall purchase is in a beautiful situation, is convenient, has a large 
kitchen, a well-room, a wood-house, besides two barns and a 
shop on the premises, and one and a half acres of land ; price, 
about $1,350 ; and there is a good young orchard near for sale, 
so that we can keep a horse and- one or two cows and have apples 
of our own from the money we shall reserve after paying our 
debts." A row of quince-trees " whose early blossoms were so 
tender and whose switches were so tough — ah ! those trees used 
to come home very near to me ! " was on the north side of the 
house.* 

The home circle was large and varied. There were at this 
time the parents and six children, " Sister Roxana and her little 
group of countless numbers." u Aunt Mary Hubbard," the mo- 
ther's favorite sister, " spent much of her time with us, and some 
of mother's favorite pupils from East Hampton, who had come 
to attend Miss Pierce's school, sought a home in our family. 
Betsy Burr, an orphan cousin, lived with us like an adopted 
daughter, while the kitchen department was under the care of the 
good and affectionate Zillah and Rachel, who came with us and 
completed the home circle." 

The circle was still farther enlarged by the coming of Grand- 
ma Beecher and Aunt Esther, who, it will be remembered, was 
Lyman Beecher's half-sister — " a woman," as Henry Ward once 
said, " so good and modest that she will spend ages in heaven 
wondering how it ever happened that she ever got there, and that 
all the angels will be wondering why she was not there from all 
eternity." " They occupied half of the next house to ours on the 
way to Prospect Hill, making a place of daily resort for some of 
the family." 

" Uncle Samuel Foote," the mother's sea-captain brother, 

*This house, enlarged by the addition which Mr. Beecher found it 
necessary to make, still remains substantially as it was seventy years ago, 
although not upon the old lot. It is now a part of Dr. Buel's hospital for 
the insane, about a quarter of a mile above the original site. 




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40 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" carae among us, on his return from each voyage, as a sort of 
brilliant genius of another sphere, bringing gifts and wonders 
that seemed to wake new faculties in all. Whenever he came to 
Litchfield he brought a stock of new books, which he and Aunt 
Mary read aloud." 

It will be seen that, without referring to other inmates of 
the family, such as boarders and visitors, who afforded a great 
variety, some amusing and others instructive, the things which 
Henry Ward said were " the great treasures of a dwelling — the 
child's cradle, the grandmother's chair, the hearth and the old- 
fashioned fireplace, the table and the window " — were all there, 
and a great many things beside. 

There were trials, almost hardships we should call them, as 
appears from a letter of Mrs. Beecher's dated January 13, 181 1, 
but none of them sufficient to bring discouragement or destroy 
her interest in scientific subjects : " . . . Would now write you a 
long letter, if it were not for several vexing circumstances, such 
as the weather extremely cold, storm violent, and no wood cut ; 
Mr. Beecher gone, and Sabbath day, with company — a clergy- 
man, a stranger ; Catharine sick ; George almost so ; Rachel's 
finger cut off, and she crying and groaning with the pain. Mr. 
Beecher is gone to preach in New Hartford, and did not provide 
us wood enough to last, seeing the weather has grown so exceed- 
ingly cold. ... As for reading, I average perhaps one page a 
week besides what I do on Sundays. I expect to be obliged to 
be contented (if I can) with the stock of knowledge I already 
possess, except what I can glean from the conversation of others. 
. . . Mary has. I suppose, told you of the discovery that the fixed 
alkalies are metallic oxides. I first saw the notice in the Chris- 
tian Observer. I have since seen it in an Edinburgh Review. 
The former mentioned that the metals have been obtained by 
means of the galvanic battery ; the latter mentions another and, 
they say, a better mode. I think this is all the knowledge I have 
obtained in the whole circle of arts and sciences of late ; if you 
have been more fortunate, pray let me reap the benefit." 

Looking at both its sunshine and its shadows, this Litchfield 
parsonage offers an illustration of an ideal New England home. 
The household was large, large enough to contain in itself a great 
variety of resources, and able in that roomy house to offer a 
broad hospitality to all comers. Democratic in the best sense 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 



41 



of the word, servants being considered and treated as constitu- 
ent members ; wide awake, reading all the new books, dis- 
cussing all the vital questions of the day, arguing all the knotty 
points of theology; industrious and frugal; allied to the best life 
of the place and the times, with a broad outlook that took with- 
in its horizon all the interests of country and humanity, of the 
kingdom of God at home and abroad, social, political, and spiri- 
tual, it was good soil, and a good exposure for planting a tree 
whose branches should spread abroad throughout the land and 
the whole earth. 

Into this family was born a son, June 24, 1813 — "the fourth, 
fifth, sixth, or seventh child, somewhere thereabouts," as he him- 
self says in a speech before the London Congregational Board, 
with that forgetfulness of numbers which was always character- 
istic of him. In fact, the ninth child, the eighth living at the 
time. It was in one of his favorite months, that of June, " which 
bursts out from the gates of heaven with all that is youngest, and 
clothed with that which is the most tender and beautiful," that 
he began his career. 

The grandmother, Roxana Foote, being with her daughter 
at the time, and remembering her own two favorite sons, who 
died in youth, named the new-born infant after his uncles, Henry 
and Ward. 

They were stirring times, those of the early summer of 1813. 
The second war of our national independence was then in 
progress, and tidings had just reached the village that Fort 
Brown had been captured by the United States forces. Lyman 
Beecher says of those times : 

"Our dangers in the war of 1812 were very great, so great 
that human skill and power were felt to be in vain. Thick 
clouds begirt the horizon, the storm roared louder and loud- 
er ; it was dark as midnight, every pilot trembled, and from most 
all hope that we should be saved was taken away ; and when 
from impenetrable darkness the sun burst suddenly upon us 
and peace came, we said : ' Our soul is escaped as a bird from 
the snare of the fowler. The snare is broken and we are 
escaped.' " 

Across the water Napoleon was rallying from the disaster of 
his Russian campaign, and making the Continent again re- 
sound with the roar of his cannon. Not only did these events 



u- 



42 REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

stir mind and heart of all alike, but the increased taxation and 
the high prices that resulted from a world at war were severely felt 
in the parsonage. Mrs. Lyman Beecher wrote : " We feel the 
war somewhat more than we should one between the Turks and 
Crim Tartars, inasmuch as, for the most part, every article is 
double or treble the former price, and some things even more 
than that." 

These were also the days of the inauguration of some of 
those great moral movements that are even now in progress in 
this State and in the land. It was but the year before that the 
General Association of Connecticut, under the leadership of 
Lyman Beecher, had taken decided action upon the temperance 
question. In speaking of it he says : 

" I was not headstrong then, but I was heart-strong — oh I 
very, very ! From that time on the movement went on, not only 
in Connecticut but marching through New England and march- 
ing through the world. Glory to God ! Oh ! how it wakes my 
old heart up to think of it ! " 

Morals in general at this time were at a low ebb, and he 
secured the organization of a " General Society for the Suppres- 
sion of Vice and the Promotion of Good Morals in the State." 

His sermon upon the " Building of Waste Places " resulted in 
the institution of a " Domestic Missionary Society " for the work 
of home evangelization in Connecticut, and he had already 
secured a Foreign Missionary Society for Litchfield, which was 
one of the most efficient auxiliaries of the American Board, then 
but recently established. The conflict concerning the Standing 
Order which in 1818 resulted in the withdrawal of State aid 
from the Congregational churches, and which Dr. Beecher 
feared as likely to open the flood-gates of ruin upon the State, 
and by reason of which he says, " I suffered what no tongue 
can tell, for the best thing that ever happened to the State of 
Connecticut," was just beginning. 

In all the movements of this progressive period stands this 
village parsonage, like an outpost of an advancing army, held 
almost within the enemy's lines. 

Added to these -public labors and troubles a very heavy 
family sorrow was laid upon them during this year. The mother, 
for months before the birth of her ninth child, saw her favorite 
sister, Mary Hubbard, slowly wasting away with consumption, 



44 RE V - HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

and had need to call up all her resources of faith and resignation 
to meet this complication of trials that was upon them. 

So this child was nourished, even before birth, in the sweet 
spirit of a most godly soul, deepened and chastened by both 
private griefs and public sorrows, and was ushered into the world 
at an era of most important events, into the very midst of multi- 
plied .labors and stirring, progressive movements. All these 
formed, as it were, an atmosphere of influence as imperceptible 
to the eye as common air, but as powerful in moulding character 
in its formative periods as are the natural forces in shaping the 
mountains or growing the' forests. By virtue of that law by 
which the offspring are affected by those things which most 
interest the parents, we may safely say that Henry Ward Beecher 
was in part a product of the times that preceded, attended, and 
followed his birth, and was stamped by their strong and peculiar 
characteristics. He carried war in him as a birth-mark, but with 
him it was war against wickedness and wrong. 

The springs of consolation, which flowed from him in after- 
years for the relief of troubled souls the world over, were such 
as his mother resorted to in days of trial, and were opened to 
him in her bosom ; and he was continually pressing forward 
through life to some new measure of reform, to some new step of 
attainment, by virtue of that reforming, progressive age that so 
early became a very part of his nature. 







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CHAPTER III. 

CHILDHOOD. 

Early Glimpses — Recollections of the Mother — Going to School at Ma'am 
Kilbourne's — His First Letter — District School — The Coming of the 
New Mother — His First Ride on Horseback — A Merry Household- 
Fishing Excursions — Minister's Wood-Spell — Saturday Night — Going 
to Meeting— The Puritan Sabbath — The Cold of Litchfield Hill— Rats- 
Work — The Catechism — Formative Influences — Summing Up. 

WE of course see but little of him in these early years. 
" The younger members of the Beecher family came into 
existence in a great, bustling household of older people, all 
going their several ways and having their own grown-up interests 
to carry. 

"The child growing up in this busy, active circle had con- 
stantly impressed upon it a sense of personal insignificance as a 
child, and the absolute need of the virtue of passive obedience 
and non-resistance as regards all grown-up people. To be stat- 
edly washed and dressed and catechised, got to school at regular 
hours in the morning and to bed inflexibly at the earliest possible 
hour at night, comprised about all the attention that children 
could receive in those days." 

Here and there a glimpse is given, just enough to tell us the 
direction the stream is taking. The first is found in a letter of 
the mother to her sister, Harriet Foote, written when he was a 
little more than a year old : 

"7 u ly I2 > 1814. — . . . I arrived Saturday at sunset, and 
found all well, and boy (Henry Ward) in merry trim, glad at 
heart to be safe on terra firma after all his jolts and tossings." 

Again in November of the same year : 

" I write sitting upon my feet with my paper on the seat of a 
chair, while Henry is hanging round my neck and climbing on 
my back." 

He himself gives- an experience of a little later period : 

" I remember very well when I was but two years old 
(strange as it may seem ; sometimes I think I spent all my re- 
membering power on that early period !) finding myself in the 

46 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 47 

east entry of my father's great house, alone, coming down-stairs, 
or trying to. The sudden sense which I had of being alone 
frightened me, and I gave one shriek ; and then the echo of my 
voice scared me worse, and I gave another shriek that was more 
emphatic ; and I remember seeing the light stream in from the 
dining-room, and being taken up by loving hands. The face I 
do not recall, the form I do not recall ; but I remember the 
warm pressure. It was my mother, who died when I was three 
years old. She took me to her bosom. I recollect sitting by the 
side of some one who made me feel very happy ; and I recol- 
lect seeing my father's swart face on the other side of the table. 

" Now I could not paint my mother's face ; but I know how 
her bosom felt. I know how her arms felt. I have a filial sense, 
a child's interpretation, of motherhood. It was only an emotion 
or instinct in me, but it was blessed." 

This incident of the mother is supplemented by two of the 
sister Harriet, in which the little boy Henry had a part : 

" In my own early childhood," she says, " only two incidents 
of my mother twinkle like rays through the darkness. One was 
of our all running and dancing out before her from the nursery 
to the sitting-room one Sabbath morning, and her pleasant voice 
saying after us, ' Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. ' " 

Another remembrance is this : " Mother was an enthusiastic 
horticulturist in all the small ways that limited means allowed. 
Her brother John, in New York, had just sent her a small parcel 
of tulip bulbs. I remember rummaging these out of an obscure 
corner of the nursery one day when she was out, and being 
strongly seized with the idea that they were good to eat, and us- 
ing all the little English I possessed to persuade my brothers 
that these were onions such as grown people ate, and would be 
very nice for us. So we fell to and devoured the whole ; and I 
recollect being somewhat disappointed in the odd, sweetish taste, 
and thinking that onions were not as nice as I had supposed. 
Then mother's serene face appeared at the nursery door, and 
we all ran toward her and with one voice began to tell our 
discovery and achievement. We had found this bag of onions 
and had eaten them all up. Also I remember that there was not 
even a momentary expression of impatience, but that she sat 
down and said : ' My dear children, what you have done makes 
mamma very sorry. Those were not onion-roots, but roots of 



48 BIOGRAPHY OF 

beautiful flowers ; and if you had let them alone ma would have 
had next summer in the garden great, beautiful red and yellow 
flowers such as you never saw.' I remember how drooping 
and dispirited we all grew at this picture, and how sadly we re- 
garded the empty bag." 

When the mother grew sick and the children were admit- 
ted to her bedside once a day, Henry was among the number, 
although no memory of the fact lingered with him in after-years. 

Mrs. Stowe writes of this event : 

" I have a vision of a very fair face with a bright red spot 
on each cheek, and a quiet smile as she offered me a spoon- 
ful of her gruel ; of our dreaming one night, we little ones, that 
mamma had got well, and waking in loud transports of joy, and 
being hushed down by some one coming into the room. Our 
dream was indeed a true one. She was for ever well ; but they 
told us she was dead, and took us in to see what seemed so cold 
and so unlike anything we had ever seen or known of her." 

Mrs. Reeve, one of the most intimate friends of the family, 
writes of the last day of her life : 

" She told her husband that her views and anticipations of 
heaven had been so great that she could hardly sustain it, and if 
they had been increased she should have been overwhelmed, and 
that her Saviour had constantly blessed her ; that she had peace 
without one cloud, and that she had never during her sickness 
prayed for her life. She dedicated her sons to God for mission- 
aries, and said that her greatest desire was that her children 
might be trained up for God, and she trusted God would, in his 
own time, provide another companion for him that would more 
than fill her place. 

" She spoke of the advancement of Christ's kingdom with 
joy, and of the glorious day that was ushering in. 

" She attempted to speak to her children, but she was ex- 
tremely exhausted, and their cries and sobs were such that she 
could say but little. She told them that God could do more 
for them than she had done or could do, and that they must trust 
him. 

" Mr. Beecher then made a prayer, in which he gave her back 
to God and dedicated all that they held in common to him. 
She then fell into a sweet sleep from which she awoke in heaven. 
It is a most moving scene to see eight little children weeping 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 



49 



around the bed of a dying mother ; but still it was very cheering 
to see how God could take away the sting of death and give 
such a victory over the grave." 

Mr. Beecher's remembrance of this event was simply of a 
feeling of fear and pain at the weeping of the children around 
him, and of interest in the baby, Charles, in his little white dress, 
as he was lifted up in the arms of one of the attendants. 

Of the funeral we read from Mrs. Stowe's pen : 

" Henry was too little to go ; I remember his golden curls 
and little black frock, as he frolicked like a kitten in the sun in 
ignorant joy. 

" I remember the mourning dresses, the tears of the older 
children, the walking to the burial-ground and somebody's speak- 
ing at the grave, and the audible sobbing of the family ; and 
then all was closed, and we little ones, to whom it was so con- 
fused, asked the question where she was gone and would she 
never come back ? They told us at one time that she had been 
laid in the ground, at another that she had gone to heaven. 
Whereupon Henry, putting the two things together, resolved to 
dig through the ground and go to find her ; for being discovered 
under sister Catherine's window one morning digging with great 
zeal and earnestness, she called to him to know what he was do- 
ing, and, lifting his curly head, with great simplicity he answered : 
1 Why, I am going to heaven to find ma ! ' " 

We next hear of him in a letter written by his sister, February 
i, 1817 : 

"... Henry is a very good boy, and we think him a re- 
markably interesting child, and he grows dearer to us every day. 
He is very affectionate, and seems to love his father with all his 
heart. His constant prattle is a great amusement to us all. 
He often speaks of his sister Harriet, and wishes spring would 
come, so that she might come home and go to school with him." 

This was in the winter when he was past three years old. 

Perhaps the prattle of this one will be instructive as well as 
amusing some day. Who knows ? 

At last spring comes, and with it his sister Harriet from her 
long visit at Nutptains, and an important era in his life opens. 
He begins to go to school, with her as his companion and guar- 
dian. 

He is just four years old that summer, the usual age for school 



50 BIOGRAPHY OF 

beginnings in rural New England. They went to Ma'am Kil- 
bourne's on West Street, and there he clambered up the first 
rounds of the ladder of book-learning and took his first lessons. 
These consisted in repeating his letters twice a day, such as he 
could remember, and having the others pointed out to him 
from Webster's spelling-book, as he stood, a chubby, bare-footed, 
round, rosy-faced boy, in front of the dreaded schoolma'am, who 
had been made sharp and angular by her years of labor in sharp- 
ening the intellectual faculties of generations of children. 

In due time Charles is large enough to join the older brother 
and sister, and tells us : 

" I remember all three of us coming out of our yard and 
stringing along, holding each other by the hand and saying every 
morning, ' W'hat if a great big dog should come out at us ?' and 
Henry, as the larger brother and protector of the group, an- 
swering, ' I would take an axe and chop his head off.' " 

As yet he wears his hair in long golden curls, the badge of a 
continued infantile state ; but some of the girls at school impro- 
vising a pair of shears from the pieces of tin thrown out from 
a shop near by, and cutting off some of the coveted locks, it is 
thought best at home to cut them all off ; and now, with trousers, 
and suspenders, and jacket, and short hair, and bare feet, he 
emerges from the half-infantile, girlish state and becomes a full- 
fledged boy, much to his own satisfaction : " he considered that 
his manhood had now commenced." 

That the instruction of his teacher is not all thrown away is 
evident by the letter which he wrote at this time, when he was 
five years old, of which a facsimile is given. Its merits of di- 
rectness and originality, at least in the matter of spelling, will be 
readily recognized : 



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yufz fiH At- WX 
ft/I A HAZ A BAFV "P 

Th E Qiv Sow MA ^ six Ti)s J? 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



51 



One incident of about these times, which is related by his 
brother, is ludicrously prophetic : 

" I remember Henry's coming in and taking his turn " (read- 
ing to Aunt Esther). "Once the piece was about wild beasts, and 
it said 'two monstrous lions came out.' I can see Henry's red 
face and declamatory air as he read it ' two monstrofalous great 
lions came out.' " 

From Widow Kilbourne's he graduated into the district 
school, which was a few rods north of the parsonage, and was at- 
tended by all the children of quite a large farming district. Like 
the other children, he carried sewing and knitting, and the sister 
tells us that " this bashful, dazed-looking boy pattered bare-foot 
to and from the little unpainted school-house, with a brown towel 
or a blue checked apron to hem during the intervals between his 
spelling and reading lessons." 

His eagerness for sister Harriet to return, that he may begin 
school, has long since subsided, and given\ place to an unusual 
dislike for his whole district-school experience, as appears from 
reminiscences which he wrote in after-years : 

" It was our misfortune, in boyhood, to go to a district school. 
It was a little, square pine building, blazing in the sun, upon 
the highway, without a tree for shade or sight near it ; without 
bush, yard, fence, or circumstance to take off its bare, cold, hard, 
hateful look. Before the door, in winter, was the pile of wood 
for fuel, and in summer there were all the chips of the win- 
ter's wood. In winter we were squeezed into the recess of the 
farthest corner, among little boys, who seemed to be sent to 
school merely to fill up the chinks between the bigger boys. 
Certainly we were never sent for any such absurd purpose as -an 
education. There were the great scholars — the school in winter 
was for them, not for us pickaninnies. We were read and spelt 
twice a day, unless something happened to prevent, which did 
happen about every other day. For the rest of the time we were 
busy in keeping still. And a time we always had of it ! Our 
shoes always would be scraping on the floor or knocking the 
shins of urchins who were also being ' educated.' All of our lit- 
tle legs together (poor, tired, nervous, restless legs with nothing 
to do ! ) would fill up the corner with such a noise that, every ten 
or fifteen minutes, the master would bring down his two-foot 
hickory ferule on the desk with a clap that sent shivers through 



52 BIOGRAPHY OF 

our hearts to think how that would have felt if it had fallen some- 
where else ; and then, with a look that swept us all into utter 
extremity of stillness, he would cry, ' Silence in that corner ! ' 
It would last for a few minutes ; but little boys' memories are 
not capacious. Moreover, some of the boys had mischief, and 
some had mirthfulness, and some had both together. The con- 
sequence was that just when we were the most afraid to laugh 
we saw the most comical things. Temptations which we could 
have vanquished with a smile out in the free air were irresistible 
in our little corner, where a laugh and a spank were very apt to 
woo each other. So we would hold on and fill up ; and others 
would hold on and fill up too ; till by and by the weakest would 
let go a mere whiffet of a laugh, and then down went all the pre- 
cautions, and one went off, and another, and another, touching 
the others off like a pack of fire-crackers ! It was in vain to 
deny it. But as the process of snapping our heads and pulling 
our ears went on with primitive sobriety, we each in turn, with 
tearful eyes and blubbering lips, declared 'we didn't mean to,' 
and that was true ; and that 'we wouldn't do so any more,' and 
that was a lie, however unintentional, for we never failed to do 
just so again, and that about once an hour all day long. 

" Besides this our principal business was to shake and shiver 
at the beginning of the school for very cold ; and to sweat and 
stew for the rest of the time before the fervid glances of a great 
box iron stove, red-hot. There was one great event of horror 
and two of pleasure : the first was the act of going to sc/iool, com- 
prehending the leaving off play, the face-washing and clothes-in- 
specting, the temporary play-spell before the master came, the 
outcry, ' There he is ! the master is coming!' the hurly-burly rush, 
and the noisy clattering to our seats. The other two events of 
pleasure were the play-spell and the dismissal. O dear ! can 
there be anything worse for a lively, mercurial, mirthful, active 
little boy than going to a winter district school ? Yes — going 
to a summer district school ! There is no comparison. The one 
is the Miltonic depth, below the deepest depth. 

"A woman kept the school, sharp, precise, unsympathetic, 
keen, and untiring. Of all ingenious ways of fretting little boys 
doubtless her" ways were the most expert. Not a tree to shelter 
the house ; the sun beat down on the shingles and clapboards till 
the pine knots shed pitchy tears, and the air was redolent of hot 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 53 

pine-wood smell. The benches were slabs with legs in them. 
The desks were slabs at an angle, cut, hacked, scratched ; each 
year's edition of jack-knife literature overlaying its predeces- 
sor, until it then wore cuttings and carvings two or three inches 
deep. But if we cut a morsel, or stuck in pins, or pinched off 
splinters, the little sharp-eyed mistress was on hand, and one 
look of her eye was worse than a sliver in our foot, and one 
nip of her fingers was equal to a jab of a pin ; for we had tried 
both. 

" We envied the flies — merry fellows ! bouncing about, tast- 
ing that apple-skin, patting away at that crumb of bread ; now 
out the window, then in again ; on your nose, on your neighbor's 
cheek, off to the very schoolma'am's lips ; dodging her slap, and 
then letting off a real round and round buzz, up, down, this way, 
that way, and every way. Oh ! we envied the flies more than any- 
thing, except the birds. The windows were so high that we could 
not see the grassy meadows ; but we could see the tops of distant 
trees, and the far, deep, bounteous blue sky. There flew the 
robins ; there went the blue-birds : and there went we. We fol- 
lowed that old polyglot, the skunk-blackbird, and heard him de- 
scribe the way they talked at the winding up of the Tower of 
Babel. We thanked every meadow-lark that sung on, rejoicing 
as it flew. Now and then a ' chipping-bird ' would flutter on 
the very window-sill, turn its little head sidewise, and peer in on 
the medley of boys and girls. Long before we knew that it was 
in Scripture we sighed : Oh ! that we had the wings of a bird ; 
we would fly away and be out of this hateful school. As for 
learning, the sum of all that we ever got at a district school would 
not cover the first ten letters of the alphabet. One good, kind, 
story-telling, Bible-rehearsing aunt at home, with apples and gin- 
ger-bread premiums, is worth all the schoolma'ams that ever 
stood by to see poor little fellows roast in those boy-traps called 
district schools. 

"I have not a single pleasant recollection in connection with 
my school-boy days. The woods were full of temptations, the 
trees called me, the birds wanted me, the brooks sung entreaties. 
It seemed cruel to be shut up. The brooks, birds, flowers, sun- 
shine, and breezes were free ; why not I ? " 

In the autumn of 181 7, when Henry Ward was a few months 
past four years of age, Dr. Lyman Beecher married Miss Harriet 



54 BlOCRAPHY OP 

Porter, of Portland, Maine, and brought his bride at once to 
Litchfield. 

The advent of the new mother is thus described by Mrs. 
Stowe : 

" I was about six years old and slept in the nursery with my 
two younger brothers, Henry and Charles. We heard father's 
voice in the entry, and started up in our little beds, crying out as 
he entered our room, ' Why, here's pa ! ' A cheerful voice called 
out from behind him, ' And here's ma.' 

"A beautiful lady, very fair, with bright blue eyes and soft 
auburn hair bound round with a black velvet bandeau, came into 
the room smiling, eager and happy-looking, and, coming up to 
our beds, kissed us and told us that she loved little children and 
that she would be our mother. Never did stepmother make a 
prettier or sweeter impression. The next morning I remember 
we looked at her with awe. She seemed to us so fair, so delicate, 
so elegant that we were almost afraid to go near her. We must 
have been rough, red-cheeked, hearty country children, honest, 
obedient, and bashful. She was peculiarly dainty and neat in 
all her ways and arrangements ; and I remember I used to feel 
breezy and rough and rude in her presence. We felt a little in 
awe of her, as if she were a strange princess rather than our own 
mamma ; but her voice was very sweet, her ways of moving and 
speaking very graceful, and she took us up in her lap and let us 
play with her beautiful hands, which seemed wonderful things 
made of pearl and ornamented with strange rings." 

In a letter written to her sister Mrs. Beecher gives her im- 
pressions of the group. She says: "We surprised them here 
almost as much as Mr. Beecher did us. They did not expect us 
till the following evening, but it was a joyful surprise to them. 
I never saw so many rosy cheeks and laughing eyes. The little 
ones were all joy and gladness. They began all, the first thing, 
to tell their dreams, for it seems they have dreamed of nothing 
else but father's coming home ; and some dreamed he came 
without me, and some that he brought two mothers. They all 
became immediately very free and social, except the youngest 
(Charles), and he is quite shy ; calls me ' lady,' and sometimes 
'dear lady,' but he loves aunt much the best. I have never 
seen a finer family of children, or a more agreeable. I am de- 
lighted with the great familiarity and great respect subsisting 



REV. HEARY ward beech er. 55 

between parent and children. It is a house of great cheerfulness 
and comfort, and I am beginning to feel at home. Harriet and 
Henry are very desirous for me to send their love." 

Later she writes of them : 

" I perceive them to be of agreeable habits, and some of them 
of uncommon intellect. . . . Harriet and Henry come next, 
and they are always hand-in-hand. They are as lovely children 
as I ever saw, amiable, affectionate, and very bright. . . . Our 
dwelling is pleasantly situated. The garden yields plenty of 
vegetables for the year, plenty of cherries, and the orchard fur- 
nishes cider and apples enough. A barrel of apple-sauce is made 
in the fall, which the children use instead of butter. . . . The 
boys are up before it is quite day, and make fires, and we are 
all down and have prayers before sunrise. Our domestic wor- 
ship is very delightful. We sing a good deal and have read- 
ing aloud as much as we can." 

The following silhouette, although following the last by quite 
an interval of time — it is in 1819 — is our next family picture in 
order : 

" Papa is well and is still writing that piece with a hard name, 
I can't remember what. Mamma is well, and don't laugh any 
more than she used to. Catherine goes on just as she always did, 
making fun for everybody. George is as usual. Harriet makes 
just as many wry faces, is just as odd, and loves to be laughed at 
just as much as ever. Henry does not improve much in talking, 
but speaks very thick. Charles is the most mischievous little 
fellow I ever knew. He seems to do it for the very love of it ; is 
punished and punished again, but it has no effect. He is the 
same honest little boy, and I love him dearly." 

It must have been about this time that Henry had the expe- 
rience which he thus describes : 

"When I was a lad I was ambitious to ride, but never was 
permitted to ride except behind an elder brother ; but one fair 
morning, as the horse was brought out to be watered, I bestrode 
him and took the reins in my hand. He made for the brook 
with considerable celerity ; but though he was nimble I was 
willing, and I succeeded in holding on and getting back without 
any accident. So elated was I with my first attempt at horse- 
back-riding that I felt that I was the horseman of the neigh- 
borhood. The next morning I repeated the ride, but with a. 



56 BIOGRAPHY OF 

variation ; for, being unaccustomed to some of the phases oi 
horseback-riding, I was not prepared for what occurred. The 
horse did not perform just as I wanted him to, so I laid the whip 
on him, and he darted forward, and when he reached the edge 
of the brook he suddenly stopped and I went on ! " 

They are a merry lot of children, getting up little impromptu 
concerts, charades, and games of all kinds, at one time going so 
far as to dramatize a favorite story. They " curtain off the end 
of the parlor," and " complete the entertainment amid thunders 
of applause." 

Animal life is regarded, and the absent members of the family 
are kept duly informed of the well-being of their favorites : 

" Old Puss is very well and sends her respects to you. And 
Mr. Black Trip has come out of the barn to live, and says if 
you ever come into the kitchen he will jump up and lick your 
hands and pull your frock, just as he serves the rest of us. 
Henry and Charles love to play with him very much." 

Little events in the family are noted and immortalized in 
verse, of which the following letter is a sample : 

"... Apropos, last week was interred Tom, Junior, with fu- 
neral honors, by the side of old Tom of happy memory. What a 
fatal mortality there is among the cats of the parsonage ! Our 
Harriet is chief mourner always at their funerals. She asked 
for what she called an epethet for the grave-stone of Tom, Junior, 
which I gave as follows : 

" ' Here died our Kit, 
Who had a fit 

And acted queer. 
Shot with a gun, 
Her race is run, 

And she lies here.' " 

When Henry was eight years old we read of the three in this 
wise : 

" Harriet reads everything she can lay her hands on, and sews 
and knits diligently. Henry and Charles go to school. Henry is 
as sprightly and active, and Charles as honest and clumsy, as ever." 

Later in the year he can be had if really wanted : 

" We have four boarders besides our own sick folk, so that 
if you are lonesome for want of children we could easily spare 
Henry or Harriet." 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 57 

Whether the hint was taken, and the boy who was sometimes 
too " sprightly and active " and this girl who " reads everything 
she can lay her hands on " were wanted and sent, is not told. 
The next year perhaps they would not care to spare him. " I 
had the alders down at the bottom of the east lot cut up, broke 
it up, and planted to corn and potatoes. Henry and Charles 
began to help hoe a little." Any one who has had experience in 
such matters knows that hoeing potatoes in a newly-ploughed 
field just cleared of alders is no fun. At this time Henry was 
nine years old. 

It has been said by one whose hatred of orthodox religion is 
only equalled by the beauty of the language with which he is 
able to clothe his misconceptions, that " Henry. Ward Beech- 
er was born in a Puritan penitentiary, of which his father was 
one of the wardens ; a prison with very narrow and closely- 
grated windows." But Mrs. Stowe wrote years ago : " One of 
my most vivid impressions of the family, as it was in my childish 
days, was of a great household inspired by a spirit of cheerful- 
ness and hilarity, and of my father, although pressed and driven 
with business, always lending an attentive ear to anything in the 
way of life and social fellowship." 

The brother Charles, who was an almost inseparable compan- 
ion for Henry in those days, says in a letter recently received : 
" The parental authority was pronounced but not very strict. 
That is, there was never any thought in the mind of the children 
of disobedience, but resort to corporal punishment was rare. 

" Nor was brother Henry made to work very hard, nor was 
father very strait-laced or stern. Nor were we often switched, 
tho' I dare say we deserved it. I only remember once distinct- 
ly, when Henry performed the gymnastics and I furnished the 
music (out in the barn). Fortunately for me, the switch was 
mostly used up on him as the elder — a birthright I did not envy 
— and I howled in sympathy, with a few cuts for Da Capo. 

" The fact is, father was very fond of all his children and 
frolicked and romped with them. All the work there was to do 
(chores we called it) was to take care of a horse and cow, and 
in spring make garden, and, after wood-spell, carry in and pile 
up wood, I remember that we were told if we made the 
garden so and so, or did this or that, we should go fishing ; and 
we used to go, the whole family of us, to Little Pond or 



58 BIOGRAPHY OF 

Great Pond, and catch ' Perchy, roachy, bullhead,' as we sang it. 
One afternoon at Little Pond, where father had taken Henry and 
me in the chaise ( l one-hoss '), we were catching roach when the 
church-bell rang, and father remembered that it was Preparatory 
Lecture, and the way we scurried in the old vehicle may be im- 
agined." 

Mrs. Stowe writes : " I remember when the wood was all in 
and piled and the chips swept up, then father tackled the horse 
into the cart and proclaimed a grand fishing party down to Little 
Pond ; and how we all floated among the lily-pads in our boat, 
christened ' The Yellow Perch,' and every one of us caught a 
string of fish, which we displayed in triumph on our return." 

The father was very wise in directing the homely labors of 
the household, so that they became occasions of mental stimu- 
lus. 

" I have the image of my father still, as he sat working the 
apple-peeler. ' Come, George/ he said, ' I'll tell you what we'll do 
to make the evening go off. You and I'll take turns and see 
who'll tell the most out of Scott's novels ' (for those were the 
days when the ' Tales of my Landlord ' and ' Ivanhoe ' had just 
appeared) ; and so they took them novel by novel, reciting scenes 
and incidents, which kept the eyes of all the children wide open 
and made the work go on without flagging. 

" Occasionally he would raise a point of theology on some in- 
cident narrated, and ask the opinion of one of his boys and run a 
sort of tilt with him, taking up the wrong side of the question 
for the sake of seeing how the youngster could practise his logic. 
If the party on the other side did not make a fair hit at him, 
however, he would stop and explain to him what he ought to 
have said : ' The argument lies so, my son ; do that and you'll 
trip me up.' Much of his teaching to his children was in this in- 
formal way." 

A kindly country life surrounded the minister's family, that 
could not fail of stamping the impress of its plain sincerity 
upon all who were brought in contact with it. Once a year this 
came to its climax in the winter's wood-spell, when all the farm- 
ers upon a given day added their contribution to the minister's 
wood-pile — a festival of kindness and good cheer. 

" The kind farmers wanted to see all the children, and we 
were busy as bees in waiting upon them. The boys heated the 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 59 

flip-irons and passed around the cider and flip, while Aunt Esther 
and the daughters were as busy in serving the doughnuts, cake, 
and cheese." 

Another influence we must not forget, and that was, being let 
alone. " I think," he says, " that I was about as well brought up 
as most children, because I was let alone. My father was so 
busy and my mother had so many other children to look after 
that, except here and there, I hardly came under the parental 
hand at all. I was brought up in a New England village, and 
I knew where the sweet-flag was, where the hickory-trees were, 
where the chestnut-trees were, where the sassafras-trees were, 
where the squirrels were, where all things were that boys enter- 
prise after, therefore I had a world of things to do, and so I did 
not come much in contact with family government." " Nobody," 
so says his sister, " thought much of his future, further than 
to see that he was safe and healthy, or even troubled them- 
selves to inquire what might be going on in his life." 

Some of the reminiscences of this period now given in his own 
words are interesting, not only from the wide field which they 
cover, but from the revelation they make of the susceptibility of 
his nature to outside influences. Of "going to meeting" he 
discourses in this wise : 

" The coming on of Saturday night was always a serious busi- 
ness with the youngsters. We had no stores of religious ex- 
perience on which it is presumed the old folks meditated, and 
the prospect of a whole day without anything in it to interest us 
was not a little gloomy. On no night of the week did the frogs 
croak so dismally, or the tree-toads whistle in a mood so melan- 
choly, as on Saturday night. 

11 But those blazing summer mornings! What a wealth of 
light spread over that blessed old hill-top ! W T hat a wondrous 
silence dwelt in the great round heavens above our head ! The 
birds sang on. The crows in the distance called out to each 
other in hoarse discourse. The trees stood in calm beauty — the 
great elm-trees, tall, pliant, graceful, the perfection of strength 
and beauty. All this we saw and heard while buttoning up our 
Sunday clothes by the side of the open window. For the cow 
and horse had been foddered, and the pigs fed, and all the barn 
chores done up, and a bountiful breakfast eaten, and our face and 
hands washed, and every article of apparel, from shoe to hat, had 



60 BIOGRAPHY OP 

changed from a secular to a sacred use. Not the every-day hat, 
soft, shapeless, universal instrument, used as a liquid or solid 
measure ; used now for the head, and now for a football ; used 
for a net to catch butterflies or to throw at wasps — no, not this 
bag, pocket, hat, pouch, and magazine, but the Sunday hat, 
round, stiff, hard, and respectable. 

" Although the new hat was always disagreeable to our head, 
yet we had a wonderful reverence for it, and spent no inconsider- 
able portion of our time in church in getting it dirty and then 
brushing it clean. 

" Our jacket, too, was new. Only a handkerchief was then in 
the pocket ; no knife, no marbles, no strings, no stones, no fish- 
hooks or dried angle-worms. No ; a boy's Sunday pocket of the 
olden time was purged of all temptation. In meeting-time we 
often put our little hands down into our Sunday pocket with a 
melancholy wish, ' Oh! if I only had my other clothes on ! ' 

" As soon as we were dressed and mustered in the sitting- 
room an inspection was had. The collar was pulled up a little, 
the hair had a fresh lick from the brush, the mouth must be 
wiped with a wet towel, the shoestring tied, and, after being 
turned round and round, we were started off. 

" ' Now, Henry, be a good boy.' 

"'Yes, ma'am.' 

" ' You must not laugh, or tease Harriet.' 

" ' No, ma'am.' 

" ' Don't stop on the road — go right in when you get to 
church.' 

"' Yes, ma'am." 

" Every word was sincerely promised, and efficaciously broken 
within ten minutes. 

"Oh! how high the trees seemed ! Oh! how bright the heav- 
ens were! Oh! how hard it was not to play with Chester Coving- 
ton's dog, that came running to us with bark and frolic, and 
seemed perplexed at our sturdy propriety. 

" The old musical bell up in the open belfry was busy a-toll- 
ing. It was the only thing that was allowed to work on Sunday 
— the bell and the minister. That bell-rope was always an object 
of desire and curiosity to our young days. It ran up into such 
dark and mysterious spaces. What there was up in those poker- 
ish heights in the belfry tower we did not know, but something 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 6 1 

that made our flesh creep. Once we ventured to pull that rope. 
It was a bold and venturesome thing, we knew. But a sorcery- 
was on us. It came gently and easily to the hand. We pulled 
again. ' Dong ! dong ! ' went the bell. The old sexton put his 
head out of the door when, on that particular morning, service 
had begun, and said, in a very solemn and low tone, ' Boy ! boy ! 
you little devil you ! ' and much more, I presume, but I did 
not wait for it, but cut round to the other door and sat all church- 
time trembling and wondering whether he would ' tell my pa ' ; 
and if he did, what he would say, and more especially what he 
would do. I called up the probable interview. I had numerous 
precedents on which to found a possible experience, and afflicted 
our little soul all meeting-time with needless punishment by the 
imagination. 

" But ordinarily we escaped into the minister's pew without 
special temptations. Imagine a boy of eight years old, round as 
an apple, hearty and healthy, an hour and a half in church with 
nothing to do ! We looked at the galleries full of boys and girls, 
and wished we might go into the galleries. We looked at the 
ceiling, traced all the cracks back and forth. We looked at the 
dear old aunties all round the church, fanning themselves with 
one hand and eating fennel-seed or a bit of dried orange-peel out 
of the other. We gazed out of the window high above our heads 
into the clouds, and wished we could only climb up and see the 
trees and horses and dogs that abounded around the church on 
Sunday. 

" Gradually these died out and we dropped asleep. Bless- 
ed liberty ! the child's gospel ! All trouble fled away. For a 
half-hour paradise was gained. But then an unusual thump 
on the pulpit Bible, and the ring and roar of a voice un- 
der full excitement, that went on swelling like a trumpet, and 
that no one, not the most listless, could hear without catching 
its excitement, waked us, blushing and confused that we had 
been asleep in church ! Even on the serene and marble face of 
mother the faint suggestion of a smile came, as we clutched our 
hat, supposing meeting to be over, and then sheepishly dropped 
it and sank back in dismay. But even Sunday cannot hold out 
for ever, and meetings have to let out sometime ! So, at length, 
a universal stir and bustle announced that it was time to go. Up 
we bolted ! Down we sat as quick as if a million pins were 



62 BIOGRAPHY OF 

sticking in our foot ! The right leg was asleep ! Limping forth 
into the open air, relief came to our heart. The being out of 
doors had always an inexpressible charm, and never so much 
as on Sunday. Away went the wagons. Away went the people. 
The whole Green swarmed with folks. The long village streets 
were full of company, In ten minutes all were gone, and the 
street was given up again to the birds ! 

" Little good did preaching do me until after I was fifteen 
years old — little good immediately. Yet the whole Sunday, the 
peculiar influence which it exerted on the household, the general 
sense of awe which it inspired, the very rigor of its difference 
from other days, and the suspended animation of its sermon time, 
served to produce upon the young mind a profound impression. 
A day that stood out from all others in a hard and gaunt way 
might, perhaps, be justly criticised. But it left its mark. It did 
its work upon the imagination, if not upon the reason. It had 
power in it ; and in estimating moral excellence power is an ele- 
ment of the utmost importance. Will our smooth, cosey, feeble 
modern Sundays have such a grip on the moral nature ? They 
are far pleasanter. Are they as efficacious ? Will they educate 
the moral nature as much ? " 

The cold of Litchfield Hill and the exposure of his old home 
were always remembered. 

" You may think you know something about winter ; but if you 
never spent a winter on old Litchfield Hill, where I was brought 
up, you do not know much about it. It was before the days 
of stoves. There were what we called 'box-stoves,' but they 
were a very small power for generating heat. The idea of a 
furnace was not born. It was not even within the reach of a 
prophet to predict it. 

"My father's house was a great barn of a structure, with 
rooms scattered about here and there. Mine was the west and 
north room — on the corner ; so that I had the full benefit, with- 
out any subtraction or discount, of everything that was going 
on out of doors ; for double windows were not known, and the 
carpenters did not c-are about making a tight fit. Therefore the 
wind found no trouble in coming in, and on many and many a 
morning the snow had blown from the window to my bed and 
across the foot of it ; and if anything inspires alacrity of step on 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 6^ 

a winter morning when the feet are bare, it is a drift of snow. 
Walking on it is like walking on wasps. 

" To go back to the frigid houses of New England in winter, 
without furnaces or hard coal, or air-tight stoves or steam, 
would make our dainty skin tingle. What a pother is made to 
ascertain the exact position of the North Pole, the very centre 
and navel of cold ! Why, I could have pointed to the exact spot 
sixty years ago. It was on the northwest angle of my father's 
house in Litchfield, Connecticut, in the room where I slept." 

Not only did the severity of the elements affect him, but their 
uproar as well, especially in the night-time. 

" The war of winter winds to our young ears was terrible as 
the thunder of waves or the noise of battle. All night long the 
cold, shelterless trees moaned. Their strong crying penetrated 
our sleep and shaped our dreams. At every waking the air was 
full of mighty winds. The house creaked and strained, and at 
some more furious gust shuddered and trembled all over. Then 
the windows rattled, the cracks and crevices whistled each its 
own distinctive note, and the chimneys, like diapasons of an 
organ, had their deep and hollow rumble." 

And now comes an influence that we should have passed by, 
if he himself had not given it place and elaborate notice : 

" Next to the winds our night experiences in early boyhood 
were much affected by rats. The old house seemed to have been 
a favorite of this curious vermin. There is something in the 
short, hot glitter of a rat's eye that has never ceased to affect us 
unpleasantly. We could not help imagining them to be the mere 
receptacles of mischievous spirits, and their keen eyes had always 
a kind of mocking expression, as if they said, ' You think we are 
rats, but if we get hold of you you will know that we are a good 
deal more than that.' We never could estimate how many popu- 
lated our old house. The walls seemed like city thoroughfares, 
and the ceiling like a Forum or Roman theatre. We used to lie 
in bed and marvel at what was going on. Sometimes there would 
be a great stillness, as if they had all gone to meeting. Then 
again they would troop about with such a swell of liberty and 
gladness that it was quite plain that the meeting was out. But 
nothing ever scared and amused us so much as their way of 
going up and down the partitions. At first up would come one, 
then another, and finally quite a bevy, squeaking and frolicking, 



64 BIOGRAPHY OF 

as if they were school-boys going up- stairs, nipping each other 
and cutting up all manner of pranks. Then came a stillness. 
Next a premonitory rat would rush down, evidently full of news, 
and immediately down would pour after him a stream of rats, 
rushing like mad, and apparently tumbling heels over head. By 
and by some old sawyer would commence where he left off the 
night before, cutting the same partition. To this must be added 
nibblings, rat-nestled paper, an occasional race of rats across the 
bed, the manipulation of corn in the garret, the foray with cats 
and kittens, the rat engines — 'steel traps,' 'box-traps,' 'figure- 
four's,' and all manner of devices, in spite of which the rats held 
their own, and, if allowed suffrage, would have outvoted the 
whole family, dog and cats to boot, four to one." 

He was early taught to work and endure what now might be 
called hardships. 

" It was my duty, after I got to be about eight years old, to 
go down-stairs and build a fire. Ours was a house in which, 
when the weather was cold, if water was left in any vessel it 
would freeze and split the vessel asunder ; and of course crock- 
ery had no chance. Our well used to choke up with ice so that 
we had to cut it out in order to get the bucket down ; and some- 
times, when the cistern was frozen up so that we could not get 
water from it, I have gone, on washing-days, two miles, and 
dipped water from a brook into barrels, and brought it home. 
Therefore you see that, however dainty I may be nowadays, I 
started on a very different pattern." 

But he came in after-years to be glad of this experience : 

" I am thankful that I learned to hem towels — as I did. I 
know how to knit suspenders and mittens. I know a good deal 
about working in wood — sawing, chopping, splitting, planin'g, 
J and things of that sort. I was brought up to put my hand to 
anything ; so that when I went West, and was travelling on the 
prairies and my horse lost a shoe, and I came to a cross-road 
where there was an abandoned blacksmith's shop, I could go in 
and start the fire, and fix the old shoe and put it on again. What 
man has done man can do ; and it is a good thing to bring up 
boys so that they s'hall think they can do anything. I could do 
anything." 

The greatest trial of those days was the catechism. Sunday 
lessons were considered by the mother as inflexible duty, and the 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 65 

catechism was the sine qua non. ;< The other children memorized 
readily and were brilliant reciters, but Henry, blushing, stammer- 
ing, confused, and hopelessly miserable, stuck fast on some sand- 
bank of what is required or forbidden by this or that command- 
ment, his mouth choking up with the long words which he hope- 
lessly miscalled, was sure to be accused of idleness or inatten- 
tion, and to be solemnly talked to, which made him look more 
stolid and miserable than ever, but appeared to have no effect in 
quickening his dormant faculties." 

Such were the influences that were exerted upon Henry Ward 
Beecher during these early and formative years. Various as they 
were, they preserved a general character of healthful simplicity; 
and numerous as they appear, they can yet be readily generalized. 
The first were those that were addressed to conscience, and that 
went to make this the strong, influential factor which it became 
in all well-trained New England youth of that period, and in 
none more markedly than in him. The stepmother led in this 
work. She was the conscience of the family, training to the 
strict observance of duty with a thoroughness which the father, 
with his more impulsive nature, could never have equalled, al- 
though he was in sympathy with the process. Home duties care- 
fully exacted, regular attendance upon school, the strict keeping 
the Sabbath, even the hated lesson in the catechism, were some 
of the instruments employed. Open to criticism, they may be, in 
method and extent, yet they did their work, and strong con- 
scientiousness was developed that made him tremble at the 
thought of wrong-doing, and kept him so free from viciousness 
that he was able to say : " I never was sullied in act, nor in 
thought, nor in feeling when I was young. I grew up as pure as 
a woman." 

And although in after-years he gave more stress to heart 
than conscience, and preached the Gospel rather than the law, 
it was but the carrying out the natural process of soil-making 
and forest culture: the granite ridges of conscience formed the 
foundation, clothed and hidden by the growth, but not destroyed. 

With all her admirable qualities his step-mother failed to 
satisfy his longing for affection. 

"It pleased God to give me a second mother, a very emi- 
nent Christian woman. Now, my nature was enthusiastic and 
outgushing ; I was like the convolvulus — I wanted to be run- 



66 BIOGRAPHY OF 

ning on somebody all the time. But my second mother was- 
stately and not easy to approach. She was a beautiful per- 
son, serene and ladylike. She never lacked self-possession in 
speech, gesture, or posture. She was polished ; but to my young 
thoughts she was cold. As I look back I do not recollect ever 
to have had from her one breath of summer. Although I was 
longing to love somebody, she did not call forth my affection ; 
and my father was too busy to be loved. Therefore I had to 
expend my love on Aunt Chandler, a kind soul that was con- 
nected with our family, and the black woman that cooked, who 
were very kind to me. My mother that brought me up I never 
thought of loving. It never occurred to me. I was afraid of 
her. I revered her, but I was not attracted to her. I felt that 
she was ready to die, and that I was not. I knew that at about 
twilight she prayed ; and I had a great shrinking from going past 
her door at that time. I had not the slightest doubt that she had 
set her affection on things above, and not on things beneath. I 
had the strongest conviction of her saintliness. It stamped itself 
upon my youth." 

Another division of influences comes under the head of spir- 
itual : 

" I can look back upon my own early life, and see how one 
and another took me, and how one prepared me for another. I 
can see how the largest natures did not always get access to me. 
It was late in life before my father influenced me very much. I 
think it was a humble woman who was in our family that first 
gained any considerable control over me. I feel the effect of her 
influence to this day. 

" I next came under the influence of a very humble serving- 
man. He opened up new directions to me and gave me new 
impulses. He was a colored man ; and I am not ashamed to say- 
that my whole life, my whole career respecting the colored race 
in the conflict which was so long carried on in this country, was 
largely influenced by the effect produced on my mind, when I 
was between eight and ten years of age, by a poor old colored 
man who worked on my father's farm, named Charles Smith. 
He did not set out to influence me ; he did not know that he did 
it ; I did not know it until a great while afterwards ; but he gave 
me impulses, and impulses which were in the right direction ; for 
he was a godly and hymn-singing man, who made wine fresh 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. bj 

every night from the cluster. He used to lie upon his humble 
bed (I slept in the same room with him) and read his Testament, 
unconscious, apparently, that I was in the room ; and he would 
laugh and talk about what he read, and chuckle over it with that 
peculiarly unctuous throat-tone which belongs to his race. I 
never had heard the Bible really read before ; but there, in my 
presence, he read it, and talked about it to himself and to God. 
He turned the New Testament into living forms right before me. 
It was a revelation and an impulse to me. 

" He talked to me about my soul more than any member of my 
father's family. These things impressed me with the conviction 
that he was a Christian ; and I never saw anything in him that 
led me to think otherwise. The feeling that I was sinful, that I 
needed to be born again, that there was such a thing as a regene- 
rate life produced by the Spirit of God in the soul — these feelings 
came to me by observing the actual example of persons that I 
lived with more than from all other sources put together." 

But above all others for diffusive and permanent impression 
affecting his whole nature, bringing him into sympathy with God 
in all his works as in all his words, and increasing to the day of 
his death, was the influence of his own mother. 

" The memory of my mother as one sainted has exerted a sin- 
gular influence on me. After I came to be about fourteen or fif- 
teen years of age I began to be distinctly conscious that there 
was a silent, secret, and, if you please to call it so, romantic influ- 
ence which was affecting me. It grew and it grows, so that in 
some parts of my nature I think I have more communion with 
my mother, whom I never saw except as a child three years old, 
than with any living being. I am conscious that all my life long 
there has been a moral power in my memory of her. It is evi- 
dent to me that while in education and in other material respects 
her death was a deprivation, it was also an inspiration, a commu- 
nion — one of those invisible blessings which faith comprehends, 
but which we are not apt to weigh and to estimate. 

" Do you know," he says, " why so often I speak what must 
seem to some of you rhapsody of woman ? It is because I had a 
mother, and if I were to live a thousand years I could not ex- 
press what seems to me to be the least that I owe to her. Three 
years old was I when singing she left me and sung on to heaven, 
where she sings evermore. I have only such a remembrance of 



68 BIOGRAPHY OF 

i 

her as you have of the clouds of ten years ago — faint, evanescent; 
and yet, caught by imagination, and fed by that which I have 
heard of her and by what my father's thought and feeling of her 
were, it has come to be so much to me that no devout Catholic 
ever saw so much in the Virgin Mary as I have seen in my mo- 
ther, who has been a presence to me ever since I can remember ; 
and I can never say enough for woman for my sisters' sake, for 
the sake of them that have gathered in the days of my infancy 
around about me, in return for what they have interpreted to me 
of the beauty of holiness, of the fulness of love, and of the heav- 
enliness of those elements from which we are to interpret heaven 
itself." 

In those influences that went to move the intellect, to awaken 
interest and thought, while the family life and the school and 
nature were all doing something, the dear old Aunt Esther with 
her Bible-readings and her innumerable stories and incidents 
of animal life stood pre-eminent and unapproachable at this 
period. It was but a few years before his death that he spoke 
of her early influence upon him, and read to us the story of Jo- 
seph as she used to read it to him, with the tears rolling down his 
cheeks. He told us that he had never yet been able to read that 
story or hear it read without crying. 

But in those practical influences that had to do with life, that 
gave him the impression that things could be done and must be 
done, that gave him inspiration to labor, his father took the lead. 

" What I was going to speak of was the effect upon my young 
mind of observing my father's conduct under trying circum- 
stances. I never once saw him flinch before the cold, or look as 
though anything was hard, or as if there was a reason for not 
pitching in and holding on when things were difficult. I have 
seen the time when we had to cut a twenty-five-foot tunnel out- 
ward from the kitchen-door, carrying the snow through the house; 
and such tunnels would sometimes remain a month before they 
would break down. I have seen the children around the house 
crying with cold, and slapping their hands, and stamping their 
feet, when father had to go and dig wood out of the snow-bank, 
and cut and split it"; and his alacrity and vigor infused themselves 
into the children. I recollect particularly that if, on such nights 
as this, when to the high wind severe cold and thick darkness 
were added, my father had appointments, he always fulfilled them. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 



69 



It was customary to have preaching-places all around the neigh- 
borhood, here, there, and everywhere ; and I never knew him to 
think of shrinking from an appointment, or holding himself back 
for a moment, on account of the weather. There never was a 
snow so deep, or a wind so high, or a rain so driving, or a night 
so black that the thought seemed to enter his head that he must 
give up a meeting. I have many times seen him, on cold, bitter 
nights, take out his old silk handkerchief and put it on, and go 
forth into the storm without seeming to dread it ; and often, as 
I have remembered it, I have wished I could put on his spirit in 
the same way. He did it as a matter of course. And such was 
the effect of his example on his children that there was not one 
of them that would not be ashamed to show the 'white feather ' 
in the presence of external difficulties. 

" When I was a boy I learned some hymns, and committed to 
memory an indefinite number of texts, and waded a certain dis- 
tance into the catechism, never getting through it ; and I forgot 
them again very quickly. But I do not think all of them put to- 
gether exerted any material influence upon me one way or the 
other — they did not remain in my mind to be understood when 
I was older ; but a great many things which my father did, but 
which neither he nor anybody else spoke of, have had a strong in- 
fluence on my whole life. For instance, his defying the elements, 
making himself master in every condition and under all circum- 
stances, and exhibiting an indomitable pluck which did not 
pause nor shrink — that made a powerful impression upon me, and 
has been one of the reasons of the success of my life ; not just 
here and now, but in my earlier career, when I was in the West 
on the frontier, and when I was very poor and had to do a great 
deal of rough work under circumstances of discouragement. I 
had an ideal of what a man should be and should do, and it 
stood me in stead better than any amount of catechetical instruc- 
tion could have done." 

So joined these — the stepmother, the mother, the humble ser- 
vant in the family, Charles Smith the happy Christian black man, 
Aunt Esther, and the father — hand-in-hand with nature, with the 
life and events that were moving on around them, and with God, 
in directing and moulding him in every part in these early years. 

There were none of them, perhaps, unusual, certainly not un- 
precedented ; for others besides Henry Ward Beecher have had 



JO BIOGRAPHY OF 

heavenly-minded and large-hearted mothers ; others, as well as he, 
have been trained in conscientiousness and have had a happy 
Christian example set before them, and have enjoyed the influ- 
ence of fathers full of manly inspiration, while God and nature 
have been with and around them, and yet no such marked results 
have been seen as in him. Something native there was in the 
soil that enabled it to respond to such genial influences with such 
unusual fruitage. We are driven, in accounting for this, to that 
especial endowment that was given to him and withheld from 
others through the will of One who gives to every man ac- 
cording to His own good pleasure. " And to one He gave five 
talents." 

His appearance and attainments at this time are thus summed 
up by Mrs. Stowe : " Henry was now ten years old, a stocky, 
strong, well-grown boy, loyal to duty, trained in unquestioning 
obedience, inured to patient hard work, inured also to the hearing 
and discussing of all the great theological problems of Calvinism 
which were always reverberating in his hearing ; . . . but as to 
any mechanical culture, in an extremely backward state, a poor 
writer, a miserable speller, with a thick utterance, and a bashful 
reticence which seemed like stolid stupidity. . . . 

"He was not marked out by the prophecies of partial friends 
for any brilliant future. He had precisely the organization 
which often passes for dulness in early boyhood. He had great 
deficiency in verbal memory — a deficiency marked in him through 
life. He was excessively sensitive to praise and blame, extreme- 
ly diffident, and with a power of yearning, undeveloped emotions 
which he neither understood nor could express. His utterance 
was thick and indistinct, partly from bashfulness and partly 
from an enlargement of the tonsils of the throat, so that in 
speaking or reading he was with difficulty understood. In 
forecasting his horoscope, had any one taken the trouble then 
to do it, the last success that ever would have been predicted 
for him would have been that of an orator ! ' When Henry is 
sent to me with a message,' said a good aunt, ' I always have 
to make him say it three times. The first time I have no man- 
ner of an idea more than if he spoke in Choctaw ; the second I 
catch a word now and then ; by the third time I begin to under- 
stand.' " 

Of the bashfulness referred to in the above he says : " We 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 



71 



had our own fill of it in childhood. To walk into a room where 
'company' was assembled, and to do it erectly and naturally, was 
as impossible as it would have been to fly. The sensations of 
sensibility were dissolving. Our back-bone grew soft, our knees 
lost their stiffness, the blood rushed to the head, and the sight 
almost left our eyes. We have known something of pain in after- 
years, but few pangs have been more acute than some sufferings 
from bashf ulness in our earlier years." 

Healthy, robust, frolicksome, conscientious, obedient, loving, 
and efficient, but bashful in the extreme and backward in all his 
studies, is the summing-up that we must make of Henry Ward 
Beecher at this period of his life. 



CHAPTER IV. 

Boyhood — Sent to School at Bethlehem — The Widow IngersoH's — Failure — 
A Champion — Sent to Catharine Beecher's School in Hartford — Hu- 
morous Incidents — Religious Experience. 

TO remedy the marked defects in his training, noticed in the 
preceding chapter, something must be done, or this boy will 
fail not only of becoming a student but of acquiring even a 
decent common-school education. Mr. Brace's select school 
was tried for a year, but with little benefit. After a good many 
family discussions and some correspondence it was decided to 
place him in a private school in the village of Bethlehem, seven 
miles distant from his home, under the care of Mr. Langdon, to 
begin study in earnest. Of this important era, his first going 
from home, we have not a syllable, as we are aware, from his own 
pen or lips. That there was a mingled feeling of pain at leaving 
home, of pleasure in the novelty, and a shrinking from the new 
faces and the new duties, every one who remembers this epoch 
in his own life can readily imagine. The ride, for a large part 
of the distance across a broad plateau that stretched away cold 
and strange like the Downs of England, was well calculated to 
awaken that yearning sadness which was so prominent a feature 
of his secret experiences from childhood, and gave in part that 
tone of melancholy which appears so markedly in everything 
that we know of him at this period. 

Singularly enough, he boarded with the grandmother of the 
one who afterwards became his son-in-law and is now aiding to 
write this biography. Her name was Ingersoll, and she is well 
described as a " large-hearted, kindly woman, a widow, living in a 
great, comfortable farm-house where everything was free and un- 
constrained." 

He was well remembered by my mother, Mrs. Martha Ingersoll 

Scoville, who, being somewhat older than he, had him much under 

her care. She said he was always a good boy about the house, 

72 




zs 
o 
X 



CD 



73 



74 BIOGRAPHY OF 

but very bashful. " I used to feel very sorry for him, he seemed 
so homesick. He liked to be off by himself, wandering around 
in the woods, and I don't think he studied much." 

This was true. Whether it was because this first separa- 
tion from home brought an increase of those gloomy yearnings 
of heartsickness to which he was subject at times -through life, or 
simply because of his innate dislike to the study of mere names 
and forms of things, that he failed to make progress in his books, 
no one knows. We only know on the authority of his sister, Mrs. 
Stowe, that " Henry's studies were mostly with gun on shoulder 
roving the depths of the forest, guiltless of hitting anything be- 
cause the time was lost in dreamy contemplation. Whence re- 
turning unprepared for school, he would be driven to the expedi- 
ent of writing out his Latin verb and surreptitiously reading it out 
of the crown of his hat — an exercise from which he reaped small 
profit, either mentally or morally." This was not understood at 
home at the time, and Dr. Beecher writes concerning him : 

" Mr. Langdon has been faithful with Henry, and I trust suc- 
cessful ; he says in a letter : ' His observance of my regulations 
relating to study has become exact and punctual. His diligence 
all along has gradually increased, and I think he has arrived at 
that full purpose which will insure his making a scholar. My 
method of instruction for beginners is a system of extended, 
minute, and reiterated drilling, and the make of his mind is such 
as fits him to receive benefit from the operation." 

Perhaps the method of " reiterated drilling, extended and 
minute," was not so well adapted to the boy as the teacher 
thought. At all events we have this testimony on the other side, 
that " after a year spent in this way it began to be perceived by 
the elders of the family that as to the outward and visible signs 
of learning he was making no progress." 

He was therefore brought home to Litchfield, leaving but one 
incident of his life at Bethlehem especially worthy of note. It 
was this : One of the older boys, having studied Tom Paine's 
" Age of Reason," was freely advocating infidel sentiments and 
gaining a strong and vicious influence over his companions. 
Young Beecher saw it and came to the rescue. He brushed up 
the knowledge he had already gained at the hearth-stone and 
table of his home, studied " Watson's Apology," challenged the 
advocate of Tom Paine's philosophy to a debate, and, in the 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 75 

judgment of the school, gained a complete victory, proving him- 
self thus early to be a doughty champion of the faith. 

The experiment at Bethlehem having proved substantially a 
failure, his oldest sister, Catharine, who was then teaching a 
young ladies' school in Hartford, proposed to take the boy under 
her care to see what she could do with him. 

If his nature lay in strata, as has been said — the one a dreamy, 
yearning melancholy lying at the bottom, which had its full ex- 
ercise in his lonely wanderings around Bethlehem; and the other, 
the surface one, of humor and fun — it was the latter, constantly 
effervescing and exploding, that appeared in his life in his sister's 
school of thirty or forty girls in Hartford. The story of his ar- 
ranging the umbrellas on the stairs one recess, when he was sup- 
posed to be studying grammar, so that when the outside door was 
opened by a late comer the whole series rushed pell-mell down 
into the street, greatly to the dismay of the teachers and the en- 
joyment of the school — with whom, of course, he was a great fa- 
vorite — is well known. And one of the incidents of the recita- 
tion-room is equally familiar, but, as it is very characteristic, we 
give it place, copied verbatim from Mrs. Stowe : 

" The school-room was divided into two divisions in gram- 
mar, under leaders on either side, and the grammatical reviews 
were contests for superiority in which it was vitally important 
that every member should be perfected. Henry was generally 
the latest choice, and fell on his side as an unfortunate accession, 
Deing held more amusing than profitable on such occasions. 

" The fair leader of one of these divisions took the boy aside 
to a private apartment, to put into him with female tact and in- 
sinuation those definitions and distinctions on which the honor 
of the class depended. 

" ' Now, Henry, a is the indefinite article, you see, and must 
be used only with a singular noun. You can say a man, but 
you can't say a men, can you ? ' 'Yes, I can say amen, too,' was 
the ready rejoinder. ■ Father says it always at the end of his 
prayers.' 

" ' Come, Henry, now don't be joking ! Now decline he. 
'Nominative he, possessive his, objective him.' 'You see his is 
possessive. Now, you can say his book, but you can't say him 
book.' 'Yes, I do say hymn-book, too,' said the impracticable 
scholar, with a quizzical twinkle. Each one of these sallies made 



j6 BIOGRAPHY OF 

his young teacher laugh, which was the victory he wanted. 'But 
now, Henry, seriously, just attend to the active and passive voice. 
Now, I strike is active, you see, because if you strike you do 
something. But I am struck is passive, because if you are struck 
you don't do anything, do you ? ' 

" ' Yes, I do — I strike back again ! ' " 

A letter from the afore-mentioned teacher, sent to him with 
her New Years salutation, January i, 1858, has lately come to 
hand. She says, in recalling this incident : " Memory has da- 
guerreotyped upon my mind a boy, a small specimen of perpetual 
motion, perpetual prank, and perpetual desire to give wrong an- 
swers to every sober grammatical rule, thereby not only over- 
whelming Murray but the studious gravity of a hundred school- 
girls." 

" Sometimes his views of philosophical subjects were offered 
gratuitously. Being held of rather a frisky nature, his sister ap- 
pointed his seat at her elbow when she heard classes. A class 
in natural philosophy, not very well prepared, was stumbling 
through the theory of the tides. 'I can explain that,' said 
Henry. ' Well, you see, the sun he catches hold of the moon 
and pulls her, and she catches hold of the sea and pulls that, and 
this makes the springtides.' ' But what makes the neap tides ?' 
' Oh ! that's when the sun stops to spit on his hands,' was the 
brisk reply. 

"After about six months Henry was returned to his parents' 
hands with the reputation of being an inveterate joker and an in- 
different scholar. It was the opinion of his class that there was 
much talent lying about loosely in him, if he could only be 
brought to apply himself." 

Of his religious life at this time we have a glimpse in a letter 
written by Dr. Beecher in November, 1825 : 

" Our family concert of prayer was held in the study on 
Thanksgiving Day — your mother, Aunt Esther, Henry, and 
Charles. It was a most deeply solemn, tender, and interesting 
time. . . . Henry and Charles have both been awakened, and 
are easily affected and seriously disposed now. But as yet it is 
like the wind upon "the willow, which rises as soon as it is passed 
over. It does not grapple, but the effect is good in giving pow- 
er to conscience, and moral principle producing amendment in 
conduct." 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 



77 



This was during a revival which was then in progress in 
Litchfield, in which the pastor was assisted by Mr. Nettleton, the 
great revivalist of that period. Henry was twelve years old. 

That no permanent good resulted from this work appears 
true, as the doctor feared, but for a reason very different from 
that which he gives. 

Henry Ward himself tells us why it was : 

" My mother — she who in the providence of God took me to 
her heart when my own mother had gone to see my Father in 
heaven, she who came after and was most faithful to the charge of 
the children and the household — she often took me, and prayed 
with me, and read me the word of God, and expounded to me the 
way of duty, and did all that seemed to her possible, I know, to 
make it easy for me to become a religious child ; and yet there 
have been times when I think it would have been easier for me 
to lay my hand on a block and have it struck off" than to open 
my thoughts to her, when I longed to open them to some one. 
How often have I started to go to her and tell her my feel- 
ings, when fear has caused me to sheer off and abandon my 
purpose ! My mind would open like a rosebud, but, alas ! fear 
would hold back the blossom. How many of my early relig- 
ious pointings fell, like an over-drugged rosebud, without a 
blossom ! " 

Again, and more at length, he opens his religious experiences 
of the whole period : 

" I remember having religious impressions, distinct and defi- 
nite, as early as when I was eight or nine years of age. 

" The first distinct religious feelings I had were in connec- 
tion with nature. Although I was born, as far as any one can 
be born so, a Calvinist, and although I was conversant at a very 
early age with the things which pertain to Calvinism, yet, as I 
look back, I see that the only religious feelings or impressions I 
had were those which were excited in my mind through the un- 
conscious influence of God through nature. It was not until 
years later that I knew it was the divine element. I yearned, I 
longed, for purity and nobility. I had the beginnings of the feel- 
ing of self-renunciation. I had a wistful desire that something 
higher, something superior to myself, should be developed out of 
the system of nature to help me. I had the germs of evangelical 
teaching ; but I never spoke to anybody about them, and it seems 



yS BIOGRAPHY OF 

to me a hermit could not have been more solitary, so far as that 
part of my life was concerned, than I was. 

" The next thing I remember was a transition, under the in- 
fluence of teaching, from the religious conditions and tendencies 
in my mind to a speculative state. I began to listen to sermons 
when I was eight or nine years old, and what seems strange is 
that the picturesque parts stopped not much with me ; that they 
faded out of my mind ; that the colors were not \ fast ' ; but 
that I caught hold of the speculative parts, particularly those 
which were most insoluble, about which men knew least and 
taught most — the nature of God, the purposes of God, the 
scheme of divine government, not those parts which are tran- 
scendently important, namely, the elements of justice, truth, and 
morality commingled ; that God from all eternity foreknew ; 
that, foreknowing, he predestinated ; that by predestination 
things were fixed, made certain ; that so many as he fore- 
ordained to be saved would be saved, do what they would or 
come what might — my mind greedily seized on these, not merely 
as undoubted facts, as they were to me, but as having special 
reference to myself. 

" I recollect being sometimes, as it were, behind the entrench- 
ments of such a doctrine, and wishing I could get over them, 
and feeling that I would give everything in the world if I only 
knew that I was one of the elect, and praying that God would in 
some way let me know whether I was or not. 

" At other times it would come in this shape : I had proba- 
bly been reprimanded for a misdemeanor or a delinquency, or 
something of that sort. I used to be melancholy and to sit in 
judgment upon myself ; and I remember thinking, ' Well, it is no 
use for me to try to be a good boy ' — not a saintly boy ; that sort 
did not abound where I was born, and I was certainly no excep- 
tion to the average run. I don't think there are many of that 
kind outside of Sunday-school books. Judged by the ordinary 
standard, I was a very good boy. I had no vices, and no ob- 
jectionable tendencies except those which sprang from robust 
health, buoyant spirits, and immense nerve resources. But I 
thought I was a base sinner. The pulpit represented all men as 
being sinners, and I accepted it absolutely and literally. I 
thought I was an awful transgressor ; every little fault seemed to 
make a dreadful sin ; and I would say to myself, ' There ! 1 am 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



79 



probably one of the reprobate. I have tried to be good, but I 
am going down. The probability is, I am not one of the elect ; 
and what is the use of my trying ? If I am not fore-ordained to 
be saved there is no chance for me, and I may as well go by the 
wholesale as by the retail.' So sometimes on the one side and 
sometimes on the other these thoughts wrought upon me. Not 
once or twice merely, but many times, they passed through my 
mind. .They were the sub-base, as it were, of my life. I think it 
was a period of fifteen or twenty years before I got relief from 
that undertone. It had some advantages and not a few disad- 
vantages. 

" If I had had the influence of a discreet, sympathetic Christian 
person to brood over and help and encourage me, I should have 
been a Christian child from my mother's lap, I am persuaded ; 
but I had no such influence. The influences of a Christian 
family were about me, to be sure, but they were generic ; and I 
revolved in these speculative experiences, my strong religious 
habitudes taking the form of speculation all through my child- 
hood. I recollect that from the time that I was about ten years 
old I began to have periods when my susceptibilities were so 
profoundly impressed that the outward manifestations of my 
nature were changed. I remember that when my brother George 
— who was next older than I, and who was beginning to be my 
helpful companion, to whom I looked up — became a Christian, 
being awakened and converted in college, it seemed as though a 
gulf had come between us, and as though he was a saint on one 
side of it while I was a little reprobate on the other side. It 
was awful to me. If there had been a total eclipse of the sun I 
should not have been in more profound darkness outwardly than 
I was inwardly. I did not know whom to go to ; I did not dare 
to go to my father ; I had no mother that I ever went to at such 
a time ; I did not feel like going to my brother ; and I did not 
go to anybody. I felt that I must try to wrestle out my own 
salvation. 

" Once, on coming home, I heard the bell toll, and I learned 
that it was for the funeral of one of my companions with whom 
I had been accustomed to play, and with whom I had grown up. 
I did not know that he had been sick, but he had dropped into 
eternity ; and the ringing, swinging, booming of that bell, if it 
had been the sound of an angel trumpet of the last day, would 



SO BIOGRAPHY OF 

not have seemed to me more awful. I went into an ecstasy of 
anguish. At intervals, for days and weeks, I cried and prayed. 
There was scarcely a retired place in the garden, in the wood- 
house, in the carriage-house, or in the barn that was not a scene 
of my crying and praying. It was piteous that I should be in 
such a state of mind, and that there should be nobody to help me 
and lead me out into the light. I do not recollect that to that 
day one word had been said to me, or one syllable had been ut- 
tered in the pulpit, that led me to think there was any mercy in 
the heart of God for a sinner like me. For a sinner that had re- 
pented it was thought there was pardon ; but how to repent was 
the very thing I did not know. A converted sinner might be 
saved, but for a poor, miserable, faulty boy, that pouted, and got 
mad at his brothers and sisters, and did a great many naughty 
things, there was no salvation so far as I had learned. My innu- 
merable shortcomings and misdemeanors were to my mind so 
many pimples that marked my terrible depravity ; and I never 
had the remotest idea of God except that he was a Sovereign 
who sat with a sceptre in his hand and had his eye on me, and 
said : ' I see you, and I am after you.' So I used to live in per- 
petual fear and dread, and often I wished myself dead. I tried 
to submit and lay down the weapons of my rebellion, I tried to 
surrender everything ; but it did not seem to do any good, and 
I thought it was because I did not do it right. I tried to conse- 
crate myself to God, but all to no purpose. I did everything, so 
far as I could, that others did who professed to be Christians, but 
I did not feel any better. I passed through two or three revivals. 
I remember, when Mr. Nettleton was preaching in Litchfield, 
going to carry a note to him from father ; and for a sensitive, 
bashful boy like me it was a severe ordeal. I went to the room 
where he was speaking, with the note in my trembling hand, and 
had to lay it on the desk beside him. Before I got half-way 
across the floor I was dazed and everything seemed to swim 
around me ; but I made out to get the note to him, and he said : 
' That's enough ; go away, boy,' and I sort of backed and stum- 
bled toward the door (I was always stumbling and blundering in 
company), and sat down. He was preaching in those whispered 
tones which always seem louder than thunder to the conscience, 
although they are only whispers in the ear. He had not uttered 
more than three sentences before my feelings were excited, and 



REV. HENRY V/ARD BEE CHER. 8 I 

the more I listened the more awful I felt ; and I said to myself : 
' I will stay to the inquiry meeting.' I heard Mr. Nettleton talk 
about souls writhing under conviction, and I thought my soul 
was writhing under conviction. I had heard father say that after 
persons had writhed under conviction a week or two they began 
to come out, and I said : ' Perhaps I will get out ' ; and that 
thought produced in me a sort of half-exhilaration of joy. I 
stayed to the inquiry meeting, felt better, and trotted home with 
the hope that I was on the way toward conversion. I went 
through this revival with that hope strengthened ; but it did not 
last long." 

It is evident from this chapter that if we would understand 
Henry Ward Beecher and the influences that went to the forma- 
tion of his character and to the success of his life, other things 
than parentage, home, school, or nature must be taken into the 
account. The vast things of the invisible realm have begun to 
speak to him, and his nature has proved to be peculiarly sensitive 
to their influence. 

He is thus early groping, unresting, and unsatisfied ; but it is 
among mountains, and not in marshes or quicksands. Some day 
these mountain truths, among which he now wanders in dark- 
ness, shall be radiant in his sight with the Divine Compassion 
and his gloom shall give place to abiding love, joy, and peace. 



CHAPTER V. 

Boston — Home Atmosphere — Various Experiences — Ethics rubbed in by a 
six-pound Shot — Discontent — Makes up his mind to go to Sea — To 
Study Navigation — Picture of his Life in Boston. 

IN the spring of 1826 Dr. Lyman Beecher moved with his fam- 
ily to Boston. Henry Ward was thirteen years old the follow- 
ing June, " a green, healthy country lad," " with a round, full, 
red-cheeked face." Here a new world opened to him and a new 
set of influences was brought to bear upon him. 

The same home life was around him, and, if possible, more in- 
tense than ever ; for Dr. Beecher had come to Boston to be the 
champion " of the Faith once delivered to the saints," and he 
threw himself into the work with all the zeal and enthusiasm of 
an intensely ardent nature. 

He had watched with intense interest every step of that reac- 
tion in Massachusetts from the strict theocracy of the Puritans, 
called the " Unitarian Controversy." He thoroughly understood 
and heartily condemned the process, employed by the wealthy and 
literary classes, of taking away from the church, composed pre- 
sumably of regenerate persons, the power to govern their own 
affairs and of giving it to the congregation, which was often compos- 
ed of men hostile to a spiritual religion. He had seen the domi- 
nant majority enter into the possession of church edifices and 
church property, employ ministers opposed to the old faith, and 
drive the orthodox ministry out into school-houses and town-halls ; 
and old foundations established by the fathers to perpetuate the 
faith had been seized and made to support opposite and antago- 
nistic views. All this had kindled in him a burning indignation 
against the wrong that had been perpetrated, and a deep sympathy 
for the brethren who had suffered. " It was as a fire in my bones," 
he said. " My mind was all the time heating, heating, heating." 
"His family prayers," we are told by Mrs. Stowe, "at this 
period, departing from the customary forms of unexcited hours, 
became often upheavings of passionate emotion such as I shall 

never forget. 'Come, Lord Jesus,' he would say, 'here where the 

82 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 83 

bones of the fathers rest, here where the crown has been torn 
from thy brow — come and recall thy wandering children. Behold 
thy flock scattered on the mountains ; these sheep, what have they 
done ? Gather them, gather them, O Good Shepherd, for their 
feet stumble upon the dark mountains." 

Mr. Beecher in after-years spoke of the work here as some- 
thing deeper than a mere dispute between rival denominations 
or antagonistic creeds. " The outward form of the great excite- 
ment was that of controversy between the Unitarian and Cal- 
vinistic faiths. But, as compared with the great inward reality, 
this was but superficial. It was broader than any doctrinal 
controversy, deeper than any sectarian conflict. It was a resur- 
rection of vital religion, in all churches of every name, and in 
the Unitarian churches as well as the Evangelical." 

It will be seen that the same atmosphere of deep feeling and 
triumphant faith, if possible more tropical and more thoroughly 
charged with electricity, continued in the new as in the old home ; 
but outside the family very different influences were brought to 
bear upon the lad, and he was led out into a much wider range of 
experiences. We give as many of these as space will allow. 

The first thing that greatly impressed him seems to have been 
the bells: 

*' Is there any boy left in Boston to whose ears the Christ 
Church chimes sound as they did to mine ? Some travelled per- 
sons in Litchfield had informed me that the churches in Boston 
were so thick that the bells on Sunday morning would almost 
play a tune. The first Sunday morning after the family took 
possession of the house in Sheaf e Street, being in the back-yard, 
I heard in a wondrous manner the tune of 'Greenville,' played on 
bells ! The whole air was full of ' Greenville.' 

" I was fully persuaded that this was the thing predicted, and 
that this tune simply fell into place among the vast number of 
bell-strokes. Too young to analyze or reason upon the matter, 
I listened with a pleasure and amazement which I fear nothing 
will" ever give me again till I hear the bells ring out wondrous 
things in the New Jerusalem. Blessed city ! in which dwelt so 
divine a spirit of harmony that some airy hand governed the 
widely scattered belfries, and taught the notes which each bell 
carelessly struck to come together in time and tune, and march 
through the air in harmony. And when, after a few minutes, the 



84 BIOGRAPHY OF 

tune changed and ' St. Martyn's ' came sadly and slowly through 
the air, I could contain myself no longer, but rushed, red and 
eager, to bring out ' Charles,' the inseparable companion of all 
my marvels, who opened his great eyes with a look of amaze- 
ment as utter and implicit as if he had been a young devotee wit- 
nessing his first miracle. I expounded to him the cause, taking 
for text the reports which had been made to me while yet in the 
country. Alas for marvels ! The cook, overhearing, laughed us 
out of countenance, and explained that it was a chime of bells, 
and also what a chime was. Of course we were wiser and less 
happy. But never, in forty years, has that chime of bells sounded 
in my ears without bringing back, for a second, the first electric 
shock of wonder and pleasure." 

" Next to Boston bells were Boston ships. Here first we be- 
held a ship ! We shall never again see anything that will so 
profoundly affect our imagination. We stood and gazed upon 
the ship, and smelt the sea-air, and looked far out along the 
water to the horizon, and all that we had ever read of bucca- 
neers, of naval battles, of fleets of merchantmen, of explorations 
into strange seas, among rare and curious things, rose up in a 
cloud of mixed and changing fancies, until we scarcely knew 
whether we were in the body or out. How many hours have 
we asked and wanted no better joy than to sit at the end of the 
wharf, or on the deck of some newly-come ship, and rock and 
ride on the stream of our own unconscious imagination ! We 
went to school in Boston Harbor. 

" Next to the merchant marine was the Navy-Yard. We 
stole over to Charlestown almost every week. With what awe we 
walked past the long rows of unmounted cannon ! With what 
exhilaration we looked forth from the mounted sea-battery that 
looked down the harbor, and just waited for some Britisher to dare 
to come in sight ! We have torn any number of ships to pieces 
with those cannon, with imagination for our commodore and 
patriotism for our cannoneer. There have been great battles in 
Boston harbor that nobody knows anything about but ourself ! " 

Other experiences there were of a different nature. 

The peaceful life of the quiet New England village, where 
each one took his place mostly by the position of the family and 
held it largely undisturbed, had given way to that of a city full of 
antagonisms and strife. It was a life not exactly in accordance 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 85 

with the instructions of a well-regulated Christian family, but its 
rough experiences were undoubtedly adapted to bring out some 
qualities that were useful in an after-career in which battle was 
to have so prominent a place. 

" It was with some slight contempt that we beheld our first 
companions. Our first home was in Sheafe Street, far down at 
the North End, next door to Mr. Gay, the landlord. The boys 
thereabouts were smart and lively, but few of them could wres- 
tle, and none of them often held out with us in a downright race. 
I was always long-winded, even before I began public speaking. 

" In those days no boy was a good boy among his fellows 
who had not the courage of battle. It was the duty of all living 
in certain districts, upon proper occasion, to fight the boys of 
other streets or districts. The Salem-Streeters included all the 
small streets adjacent — Sheafe Street, Bennett Street, etc. When 
nothing else was on hand small scrimmages were gotten up be- 
tween ourselves — Sheafe Street vs. Bennett Street, etc.; but we all 
united against Prince Street. Prince-Streeters were the natural 
enemies of all the surrounding streets. Yet, when the West-End- 
ers came over in battle array, yelling, throwing stones, and driv- 
ing in the timid lads caught out of bounds, all the North-Enders 
rose, forgot their local feuds, and went forth in awful array to 
chastise the wretches that lived at the West End. And if one 
were to believe all the feats of which we boasted for a month 
thereafter, he would be sure that since the days that Homer sang 
no such fighting had ever taken place. 

" But what were all these things to that implacable and in- 
eradical hatred which all true Boston boys entertained against 
Charlestown Pigs ? For by such a title did we expose the mean- 
ness, the degradation, the cowardice, the utter despicableness of 
a boy born the other side of the ' draw ' of the Charlestown 
Bridge ! " 

While the father was coming to leadership in the pulpit his 
son Henry was reaching the same point in his set by the only 
way opened to him at that time. 

" Copp's Hill ? It recalled many a boyish prank. One sport 
engaged our youthful leisure. It was called ' Follow your lead- 
er.' It was considered as a testimony to one's courage when, by 
acclamation, he was elected to leadership ! The game was 
simple ; but the results, always amusing, were sometimes some- 



86 BIOGRAPHY OF 

what too stimulating for pleasure. The leader started upon a 
run, with a long trail of boys in a line behind him, whom he en- 
deavored to throw off by doing things which they were not strong 
enough or skilful or daring enough to imitate. If twenty boys 
started, half would drop away, after a sharp run, by mere want 
of breath ; another section could be thrown off by some feat 
that terrified them. 

" We recall one memorable chase. Called to the head of the 
column, I plunged down Margaret's Lane, up Prince and back, 
up toward Copp's Hill, reducing my followers, by sheer exhaus- 
tion, one-half. A brick house was going up ; into it I dashed, ran 
up the ladder, walked along the floor-joists, and let myself down 
by a rope attached to a guy on the front. Only six or seven 
could follow. A large mortar-bed lay near by. I dashed into 
that, wading through the slush. Five came out on the other side 
with me. Tough five ! They followed me into a shop, right back 
into the adjacent parlor, out at a side-door, though some of the 
last got the yard-stick well laid on by the indignant shop-keeper, 
and the last one out came dripping from a pail of water which a 
woman flung after ' the nasty varmints,' as she styled us. Many 
other feats did we, but in vain. The five would stick. I remem- 
ber that a large part of Copp's Hill had been dug down for filling 
the ' Causeway,' leaving a precipitous face — well, say fifty feet 
high to the eyes, but, if measured, perhaps twenty feet. Ascend- 
ing the hill, I drew near the verge, a little hesitant to venture the 
plunge. But to confess that I dare not do anything would be dis- 
graceful, and so, with but a moment's pause, I jumped for a little 
crumbling foothold half-way down, and off from that, as soon as 
on it, to the bottom, which I reached in a heap, with dirt and 
stones and two boys following after ! Not stopping to rub my 
shins, rejoicing that only two were left, and desperate, I took my 
way to the near wharf where ' Billy Gray's ' ships used to be, 
climbed the side, ran along the deck, up the bowsprit, far out, 
and then, with a spring, off into deep water ! Down, down, down 
we went, and seemed likely to go on for ever. At length the de- 
scent stopped, and we rose again to the surface — O joy ! — to see 
the two boys standing on the bowsprit ! They did not dare ! 
That day's work established our reputation ! We know how Al- 
exander felt ! Caesar and Napoleon can tell us nothing new 
about the glories of victory ! " 



k£V. HENRY WARD BEEC//ER. &J 

That his country honesty was not altogether proof against the 
temptations of his life in the city is shown by a description he 
gives, in " Eyes and Ears," of his successful attempt to purloin a 
six-pound cannon-ball from the Navy-Yard : 

" One day I visited some ill-constructed vaults where shot had 
been stored. The six and twelve pound shot were extremely 
tempting. I had no particular use for them. I am to this 
day puzzled to know why I coveted them. There was no 
chance in the house to roll them, and as little in the street. For 
base-ball or shinty they were altogether too substantial. But I 
was seized with an irresistible desire to possess one. As I had 
been well brought up, of course the first objection arose on the 
score of stealing. But I disposed of that, with a patriotic facility 
that ought long before this to have sent me to Congress, by the 
plea that it was no sin to steal from the government. Next, how 
should I convey the shot from the Yard without detection ? I 
tried it in my handkerchief. That was altogether too plain. I 
tried my jacket-pocket, but the sag and shape of that alarmed my 
fears. I tried my breeches-pocket, but the abrupt protuberance 
was worse than all. I had a good mind to be honest, since there 
was no feasible way of carrying it off. At length a thought 
struck me : Wrap a handkerchief about it and put it in your 
hat. 

" The iron ball was accordingly swaddled with the handker- 
chief and mounted on my head, and the hat shut over it. I 
emerged from the vault a little less courageous than was pleasant, 
and began my march toward the gate. Every step seemed a 
mile. Every man I met looked unusually hard at me. The ma- 
rines evidently were suspecting my hat. Some sailors, leering 
and rolling toward the ships, seemed to look me through. The 
perspiration stood all over my face as an officer came toward me. 
Now for it ! I was to be arrested, put in prison, cat-o'-nine-tail- 
ed, or shot, for aught I knew. I wished the ball in the bottom of 
the sea ; but no, it was on the top of my head ! 

" By this time, too, it had grown very heavy; I must have made 
a mistake in selecting ! I meant a six-pounder, but I was sure it 
must have been a twelve-pounder, and before I got out of the 
Yard it weighed twenty-four pounds ! I began to fear that the 
stiffness with which I carried my neck would excite suspicion, and 
so I tried to limber up a little, which had nearly ruined me, for 



88 BIOGRAPHY OF 

the shot took a roll around my crown in a manner that liked to 
have brought me and my hat to the ground. Indeed, I felt like 
a loaded cannon, and every man and everything was like a spark 
trying to touch me off. The gate was a great way farther off 
than I had ever found it before ; I seemed likely never to get 
there. 

" And when at length, heartsore and headsore, with my scalp 
well rolled, I got to the gate, all my terror came to a culmination 
as the sentinel stopped his marching, drew himself up, and, look- 
ing through me, smiled. I expected him to say : ' O you little 
thievish devil, do you think T do not see through you?' But, 
bless his heart ! he only said : ' Pass ! ' He did not say it twice. 
I walked a few steps farther, and then, having great faith in the 
bravery of my feet, I pulled my hat off before me, and, carrying 
it in that position, I whipped around the first corner and made 
for the bridge with a speed which Flora Temple would envy. 

" When I reached home I had nothing to do with my shot. I 
did not dare show it in the house nor tell where I got it ; and 
after one or two solitary rolls I gave it away on the same day to 
a Prince-Streeter. 

" But, after all, that six-pounder rolled a good deal of sense 
into my skull. I think it was the last thing I ever stole (ex- 
cepting a little matter of a heart now and then), and it gave me 
a notion of the folly of coveting more than you can enjoy, which 
has made my whole life happier. It was rather a severe mode of 
catechising, but ethics rubbed in with a six-pound shot are bet- 
ter than none at all." 

His student life, which had been such a failure heretofore, 
was improved a little, and but a little. By means of the pressure 
of school discipline, backed up and made formidable by fam- 
ily pride and the advice and exhortations heard at home, he 
managed to make fair progress in most of his studies, especially 
in the rules and exceptions of the Latin grammar, and to the 
day of his death was able to establish his claims to proficiency 
in that language by rattling off the list of eleven prepositions 
that govern the ablative. But his heart was not in the work. 
Disgust, insurrection, revolution, was the stormy way along 
which he was rapidly travelling. 

This period in his own life is described in " Norwood " : 
" Long before the Amazon reaches the ocean it has grown so 



REV. HENRY WARD B EEC HER. 89 

wide that from the channel no shore can be seen from either 
side. It is still a river, but with all the signs and symptoms of 
becoming an ocean. There is a period, beginning not far from 
fourteen, in young lives, when childhood is widened suddenly, 
and carries its banks so far out that manhood seems begun, 
though as yet it is far off. The stream is ocean-deep. Upon 
this estuary of youth the currents are shifting, the eddies are 
many. Here are united the strength of the sea and the hin- 
drances of the land. 

" The important organic changes which, in our zone, take 
place in the second full seven of years, produce important results 
even in the coldest temperaments and in the slenderest natures. 
But in persons of vigor of body and strength of feeling there 
is frequently an uprising like a city in insurrection. The young 
nature, swelling to the new influences with a sense of unmeasur- 
able strength, sometimes turbulent with passions, but always 
throbbing with excited feelings led on and fed by tantalizing 
fancies, seems transformed from its previous self and becomes a 
new nature. New moral forces are developed into activity. 
Aspirations begin to quicken the soul. Ambitions grow nobler." 

Mrs. Stowe says : " The era of fermentation and development 
was upon him, and the melancholy that had brooded over his 
childhood waxed more turbulent and formidable. He grew 
gloomy and moody, restless and irritable. His father, noticing 
the change, got him on a course of biographical reading, hoping 
to divert his thoughts. He began to read naval histories, the 
lives of great sailors and commanders, the voyages of Captain 
Cook, the biography of Nelson ; and immediately, like lightning 
flashing out of rolling clouds, came the determination not to rest 
any longer in Boston, learning terminations and prepositions, but 
to go forth to a life of enterprise. He made up his little bundle, 
walked the wharf and talked with sailors and captains, hovered 
irresolute on the verge of voyages, never quite able to grieve 
his father by a sudden departure. At last he wrote a letter 
announcing to a brother that he could and would no longer 
remain at school ; that he had made up his mind for the sea ; 
that if not permitted to go he should go without permission. 
This letter was designedly dropped where his father picked it 
up. Dr. Beecher put it in his pocket and said nothing for the 
moment, but the next day asked Henry to help him saw wood. 



c)0 BlOGRAPHV 6P 

Now, the wood-pile was the doctor's favorite debating-ground, 
and Henry felt complimented by the invitation, as implying 
manly companionship. 

" ' Let us see,' said the doctor, ' Henry, how old are you ? ' 
' Almost fourteen ! ' ' Bless me ! How boys do grow ! Why, it's 
almost time to be thinking what you are going to do. Have you 
ever thought?' 'Yes; I want to go to sea.' 'To sea! Of all 
things ! Well, well ! After all, why not ? Of course you don't 
want to be a common sailor. You want to get into the navy ? ' 
4 Yes, sir ; that's what I want.' ' But not merely as. a common 
sailor, I suppose?' 'No, sir; I want to be a midshipman, and 
after that a commodore.' ' I see,' said the doctor cheerfully. 
' Well, Henry, in order for that, you know, you must begin a 
course of mathematics and study navigation and all that.' ' Yes, 
sir ; I am ready.' ' Well, then, I will send you up to Amherst 
next week, to Mount Pleasant, and then you'll begin your prepa- 
ratory studies, and if you are well prepared I presume I can make 
interest to get you an appointment.' " 

And so he went to Mount Pleasant, in Amherst, Mass., and 
Dr. Beecher said shrewdly : " I shall have that boy in the minis- 
try yet." 

In a sermon preached by his brother, Rev. T. K. Beecher, we 
have this picture : 

" All of you know more about ' Henry Ward Beecher ' than I 
do, but I know more about ' Brother Henry ' than you do. 

" A little Boston boy five years old had a brother Henry who 
was sixteen, and a brother Charles who was fourteen ; and though 
he knew of David and Goliath, who ' fell down slambang,' and 
David, ' little David ran up and cut his head off ' ! though he 
knew about Samson and the lion, yet for the present strength and 
greatness Henry and Charles were his heroes. Did they not 
own a long sled and coast down Copp's Hill and jump sixteen 
sleds at the bounce ? Did they not sharpen skates with enthusi- 
asm and go off to the mill-dam alone ? 

" By night when the tocsin rang and the little boy covered 
his head and shivered under the sheets, did not Henry and 
Charles rush down two flights of stairs and out the door, yelling 
fire ? And they were at school fitting for college at Mt. Pleasant. 
Their hair-trunk was two days a-packing, and the stage took 
them away before daylight, leaving the house so quiet and so 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 9 1 

empty. Sixteen and five — oh ! how magnificent the boy of six- 
teen to the little boy of five. I speak of brother Henry. 

" But at prayers, family prayers, Henry and Charles could 
sing, and so could the little boy. A frail, blue-eyed, willowy 
mother sat in the rocking-chair. Father would read — the little 
boy knew not what. But for the singing from village hymns 
Henry sometimes fluted, making a queer mouth ; and then, all 
kneeling, it was ever asked by father, ' Overturn and overturn, 
till He whose right it is shall come and reign, King of nations as 
King of saints.' 

" Prayers over, Aunt Esther and the little boy, he standing in 
a chair, washed the dishes, and Henry and Charles stormed out 
to the Latin School. But they went to Mount Pleasant, and Mr. 
Colton was the teacher. Twice a year they came home, at 
Thanksgiving and the summer vacation. The expected stage 
drove up, and the little boy, in agony of delight that could not be 
endured, hid himself on a trundle-bed under mother's and braid- 
ed bed-cords till, searched out, he was tossed above the clouds 
by great, strong brother Henry. 

" At morning prayers, ' Thou hast brought back our boys in 
health,' the little boy heard that and the ' overturn and over- 
turn ' part ; and that little boy, now your pastor, bears witness in 
your ears that the boys were kept, and that since those days 
there have been overturnings not a few. And further he tells 
you that those family prayers propagated the ancestral religion 
in brother Henry, though they have failed to hand down the an- 
cestral theology. 

" The boys must go to college, and leave the little boy to go 
to infant school, to Miss Bull, and learn to tell the hour on a card 
clock, and add, subtract, and count with an abacus. Henry in 
the world of departed spirits, Amherst ; Charles at Bowdoin. 
Every morning father praying for our boys at college : ' May 
they become good ministers of our Lord Jesus Christ ! ' 

"... Edward was a man, like father. But Henry and 
Charles were heroes, doing things. How they could jump ! 
How they whirled around the horizontal bar ! How Charles 
could flog a top! And Henry had peanuts and red peppermints. 
Shall I ever be big and do things, and run to fires, and go way 
down Milk Street ? 

'' Yes, one vacation brother Henrv took the little bov down 



Q2 BIOGRAPHY OF 

on Milk Street, past two Unitarian churches safely, past Tremont 
Theatre, past an open stable-door where lay a red cow with mon- 
strous horns, chewing her big mouth with nothing in it, and 
looking, oh! so strong and hungry at that little boy. But Henry 
wasn't scared. He was whistling. ' Come along, Tom,' he said, 
'that's only a cow.' 

" Henry and Charles at college ; father and eight of us stag- 
ing from Boston to Cincinnati, leaving my heroes. Amherst and 
Bowdoin loom large in my fancy still. My heroes were to stay 
and grow ! Tidings once a month : Charles has a fiddle, Henry 
has a six-keyed flute; Charles, and something about circles and 
geometry; Henry, and phrenology and temperance lectures." 

Such was his life in Boston, undoubtedly to a certain ex- 
tent beneficial, and, by reason of the activity of the streets of 
the city and the bustle of the wharves, attractive. But coming 
at the turbulent period of his own development, when the 
rough elements of its thoroughfares were more congenial to 
him than the influences of its churches, libraries, or homes, it 
was far from being satisfactory. Its liberty was not altogether 
safe, nor were its restrictions healthful ; and he says : " I cannot 
see how, if I had remained much longer in Boston, I could 
have escaped ruin." We see him, therefore, start off on the 
lumbering stage-coach, in the early autumn morning before 
daylight, for Amherst, with a sense of relief and hearty thank- 
fulness that he is escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowler. 



CHAPTER VI. 

School-Life at Mount Pleasant — Mathematics — Elocution — Testimony of 
Classmates — Religious Experiences — Troubles — A Romantic Friend- 
ship — Another Kind — Letter of Reminiscence — A Royal School-boy. 

IT was in 1827, and Henry was fourteen years old, when he 
entered the Mount Pleasant Institute. " He was admitted to 

the institution at a price about half the usual charge, for 
one hundred dollars per year." " His appearance was robust and 
healthy, rather inclined to fulness of form, with a slight pink 
tinge on his cheeks and a frequent smile upon his face. In his 
manners and communications he was quiet, orderly, and respect- 
ful. He was a good-looking youth." This is the testimony of 
one of his teachers, Mr. George Montague. 

" I think he must have been fond of children, for he was al- 
ways ready for a frolic with me. I don't remember how he spoke, 
except that he talked a good deal and was full of life and fun." 
So says a friend, in whose home he boarded, in a letter written 
during the past year. 

No place could have been better fitted to the condition of the 
boy, as he then was, than the one chosen. He was tired of the 
city with its brick walls, stone pavements, and artificial restric- 
tions, and longed for the freedom and the freshness of the coun- 
try. Amherst at that time was only a small village, fighting back 
with indifferent success the country that pressed in upon it from 
every side, and offering this city-sick lad, almost within a stone's 
throw of the school, the same kind of fields and forests that 
were around him at Litchfield, and spreading out for him a land- 
scape equal in beauty to that of his childhood home. 

Besides, he has an object in view that stirs his blood. He is 
to fit himself for the navy ; his father has promised his influence 
to get him an appointment, if wanted, and Admiral Nelson and 
all other brave admirals and commodores are his models. For 
the first time in his life he takes hold of study with enthusiasm. 

The institution was very popular in its day, and a great 



94 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

advance upon the old academy. It was semi-military in its 
methods, and in its government there was great thoroughness 
without severity. Its teachers possessed superior qualifications, 
and all were men of great kindness as well as of marked abilitv. 
Among them were two men who especially had great influence 
in directing his energies and preparing him not only for Am- 
herst College but for the greater work beyond, and who were 
ever remembered by him with the deepest gratitude. 

The first of these was W. P. Fitzgerald, the teacher of mathe- 
matics at Mount Pleasant school : 

" He taught me to conquer in studying. There is a very hour 
in which a young nature, tugging, discouraged, and weary with 
books, rises with the consciousness of victorious power into mas- 
terhood. For ever after he knows that he can learn anything if 
he pleases. It is a distinct intellectual 'conversion.' 

" I first went to the blackboard, uncertain, soft, full of whim- 
pering. ' That lesson must be learned,' he said, in a very 
quiet tone, but with a terrible intensity and with the certainty of 
Fate. All explanations and excuses he trod under foot with 
utter scornfulness. ' I want that problem. I don't want any rea- 
f sons why I don't get it.' 

" ' -I did study it two hours.' 

" ' That's nothing to me ; I want the lesson. You need not 
study it at all, or you may study it ten hours- -just to suit your- 
self. I want the lesson. Underwood, go to the blackboard ! ' 

" * Oh ! yes, but Underwood got somebody to show him his 
lesson.' 

" ' What do I care how you get it ? That's your business. 
But you must have it.' 

" It was tough for a green boy, but it seasoned him. In less 
than a month I had the most intense sense of intellectual inde- 
pendence and courage to defend my recitations. 

" In the midst of a lesson his cold and calm voice would fall 
upon me in the midst of a demonstration — 'No!' I hesitated, 
stopped, and then went back to the beginning ; and, on reaching 
the same spot again, * No!' uttered with the tone of perfect 
conviction, barred my progress. ' The next ! ' and I sat down in 
red confusion. He too was stopped with ' No ! ' but went right 
on, finished, and, as he sat down, was rewarded with, ' Very 
well.' 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



95 



" ' Why,' whimpered I, ' I recited it just as he did, and you 
said No ! ' 

" Why didn't you say Yes, and stick to it ? It is not enough 
to know your lesson. You must know that you know it. You 
have learned nothing till you are sure. If all the world says JVo, 
your business is to say Yes and to prove it I ' " 

The other helper of this period was John E. Lovell. 

In a column of the Christian Union of July 14, 1880, de- 
voted to " Inquiring Friends," appeared this question with the ac- 
companying answer : 

" We heard Mr. Beecher lecture recently in Boston and found 
the lecture a grand lesson in elocution. If Mr. Beecher would 
give through the column of 'Inquiring Friends' the methods of 
instruction and practice pursued by him, it would be very thank- 
fully received by a subscriber and student. E. D. M. 

" I had from childhood a thickness of speech arising from a 
large palate, so that when a boy I used to be laughed at for talk- 
ing as if I had pudding in my mouth. When I went to Amherst 
I was fortunate in passing into the hands of John Lovell, a 
teacher of elocution, and a better teacher for my purpose I can- 
not conceive. His system consisted in drill, or the thorough 
practice of inflexions by the voice, of gesture, posture, and articu- 
lation. Sometimes I was a whole hour practising my voice on a 
word — like 'justice.' I would have to take a posture, frequently 
at a mark chalked on the floor. Then we would go through all 
the gestures, exercising each movement of the arm and the 
throwing open the hand. All gestures except those of precision 
go in curves, the arm rising from the side, coming to the front, 
turning to the left or right. I was drilled as to how far the arm 
should come forward, where it should start from, how far go 
back, and under what circumstances these movements should be 
made. It was drill, drill, drill, until the motions almost became 
a second nature. Now I never know what movements I shall 
make. My gestures are natural, because this drill made them 
natural to me. The only method of acquiring an effective edu- 
cation is by practice, of not less than an hour a day, until the 
student has his voice and himself thoroughly subdued and trained 
to right expression. H. W. B." 

Mr. Montague says : " Mr. Beecher submitted to Mr. Lovell's 



V 



96 BIOGRAPHY OF 

drilling and training with a patience which proved his interest in 
the study to be great. The piece which was to be spoken was 
committed to memory from Mr. Lovell's mouth, the pupil stand- 
ing on the stage before him, and every sentence and word, ac- 
cent and pronunciation, position and movement of the body, 
glance of the eye and tone of voice, all were subjects of study 
and criticism. And day after day, often for several weeks in 
continuance, Mr. Beecher submitted to this drilling upon the 
same piece, until his teacher pronounced him perfect." 

His dramatic power was displayed and noted at this early 
period. Dr. Thomas Field, a classmate in the school, says : 
" One incident occurred during our residence in Mount Pleasant 
which left an abiding impression on my mind. At the exhibition 
at the close of the year, either 1828 or 1829, the drama of 'Wil- 
liam Tell ' was performed by some of the students, and your 
father took the part of the tyrant Gessler. Although sixty years 
have passed, I think now, as I thought then, that it was the most 
impressive performance I ever witnessed." 

His love of flowers was so marked as to attract the attention 
of a gardener in the village, who gave him the use of a plot of 
ground where he might sow and plant what he chose ; and here 
the boy spent many a play-hour in digging, sowing, and weed- 
ing, that he might enjoy the beauty which his own hand had been 
instrumental in producing. " In this garden-corner the chaplain 
of Mount Pleasant Institute found him one day lost in admiration 
for the opening buds and beautiful blossoms that were unfolding 
under his culture, and could not forbear to improve the oppor- 
tunity and administer a gentle rebuke to the enthusiastic youth. 
' Ah ! Henry,' he said, 'these things are pretty, very pretty, but, 
my boy, do you think that such things are worthy to occupy the 
attention of a man who has an immortal soul ? ' " The boy was 
abashed before so much dignity, and, we may add, stupidity, and 
assuming the stolid look that his bashfulness had made natural, 
at this time, under such circumstances, went on with his work 
among the flowers; but he said afterwards that he wanted to tell 
him that " since Almighty God had taken time to make these 
trifles, it did not seem amiss for him to take time to look at 
them." So, now a youth, he is walking as when a child among 
flowers, and the leader of the boys in their most venturesome 
sports is kneeling in adoring silence over beds of pansies and 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. gj 

asters, and feeding the hunger of his soul with the beauty of 
their forms and colors. 

In a letter dated December 24, 1828, addressed to his sister 
Harriet — the first that has come to our hands from Mount 
Pleasant — he gives some account of his manner of life at school, 
and various experiences : 

" Dear Sister : 

"... I have to rise in the morning at half-past five o'clock, 
and after various little duties, such as fixing of room, washing, 
etc., which occupies about an hour, we proceed to breakfast, 
from thence to chapel, after which we have about ten minutes 
to prepare for school. Then we attend school from eight to 
twelve. An hour at noon is allowed for diversions of various 
sorts. Then dinner. After that school from half-past one to 
half-past four. At night we have about an hour and a half ; 
then tea. After tea we have about ten minutes ; then we are 
called to our rooms till nine. 

" Now I will tell you how I occupy my spare time — in read- 
ing, writing, and playing the flute. We are forming a band here. 
I shall play either the flute or hautboy. I enjoy myself pretty 
well. In Latin I am studying Sallust. As to ease, all I have to 
do is to study straight ahead. It comes pretty easy. My Greek 
is rather hard. I am as yet studying the grammar and Jacob's 
Greek Reader. In elocution we read and speak alternately 
every other day. 

"... I find it hard to keep as a Christian ought to. To be 
sure, I find delight in prayer, but I cannot find time to be alone 
sufficiently. We have in our room only two, one besides myself, 
but he is most of my play-hours practising on some instrument 
or other. I have some time, to be sure, but it is very irregular, 
and I never know when I shall have an opportunity for private 
devotions until the time comes. I do not like to read the Bible 
as well as to pray, but I suppose it is the same as it is with a 
lover, who loves to talk with his mistress in person better than 
to write when she is afar off. . . . 

"Your affectionate brother, 

"Henry." 

His religious experience, of which we have heard nothing 
since he left Litchfield, the life in Boston apparently not being 



98 BIOGRAPHY OF 

very favorable to it, again attracts our attention at this point. 
He says : 

" When I was fourteen years of age I left Boston and went to 
Mount Pleasant. There broke out while I was there one of 
those infectious religious revivals which have no basis of judi- 
cious instruction, but spring from inexperienced zeal. It resulted 
in many mushroom hopes, and I had one of them ; but I do not 
know how or why I was converted. I only know I was in a sort 
of day-dream, in which I hoped I had given myself to Christ. 

" I wrote to father expressing this hope ; he was overjoyed, 
and sent me a long, kind letter on the subject. But in the course 
of three or four weeks I was nearly over it ; and I never shall 
forget how I felt, not long afterward, when a letter from father 
was handed me in which he said I must anticipate my vacation a 
week or two and come home and join the Church on the next 
Communion Sabbath. The serious feelings I had were well-nigh 
gone, and I was beginning to feel quite jolly again, and I did not 
know what to do. I went home, however, and let them take me 
into the Church. A kind of pride and shamefacedness kept me 
from saying I did not think I was a Christian, and so I was made 
a church-member." 

In an editorial in the Independent, written in 1862, upon the 
disbanding of this old church, the Bowdoin Street — originally 
Hanover Street — Church, Boston, he describes this event : 

" If somebody will look in the old records of Hanover Street 
church about 1829 they will find a name there of a boy about fif- 
teen years old who was brought into the Church on a sympathetic 
wave, and who well remembers how cold and almost paralyzed 
he felt while the committee questioned him about his 'hope' and 
■ evidences,' which, upon review, amounted to this : that the son 
of such a father ought to be a good and pious boy. Being ten- 
der-hearted and quick to respond to moral sympathy, he had 
been caught and inflamed in a school excitement, but was just 
getting over it when summoned to Boston to join the church ! 
On the morning of the day he went to church without seeing any- 
thing he looked at. He heard his name called from the pulpit 
among many others, and trembled ; rose up with every emotion 
petrified ; counted the spots on the carpet ; looked pileously up 
at the cornice ; heard the fans creak in the pews near him ; felt 
thankful to a fly that lit on his face, as if something familiar at 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



99 



last had come to break an awful trance ; heard faintly a reading 
of the Articles of Faith ; wondered whether he should be struck 
dead for not feeling more — whether he should go to hell for 
touching the bread and wine, that he did not dare to take nor to 
refuse ; spent the morning service uncertain whether dreaming, 
or out of the body, or in a trance ; and at last walked home cry- 
ing, and wishing he, knew what, now that he was a Christian, he 
should do, and how he was to do it. Ah ! well, there is a world 
of things in children's minds that grown-up people do not ima- 
gine, though they too once were young." 

Unsatisfactory in many respects as was his religious experi- 
ence, it seems to have been powerful enough to change his whole 
ideal of life. We hear no more of his becoming a sailor. He 
appears to have yielded to the inevitable, and henceforth studies 
with the ministry in view. 

That there was awakened in him a strong sense of duty and a 
deep earnestness of purpose appears from a letter written from 
the school to his brother Edward : 

"Mount Pleasant, July 11, 1829. 
" Dear Brother : 

" I have been expecting a letter from you all the time ; but I 
suppose you have too much to do to write letters. Mr. Newton 
has set up a Bible-class on Sabbath morning for the larger boys, 
and a Sabbath-school on Sabbath afternoon for the smaller boys. 
The Bible-classes are very interesting indeed. He first began with 
the 73d Psalm ; then he commenced the New Testament and is 
going through it in course. The beys generally are very much 
pleased with the lecture. 

" On Wednesday evenings he is a-going to deliver doctrinal 
sermons. All with whom I have conversed on the subject are 
very desirous that he should commence them. 

" There has been a boy named Forsyth who has since the re- 
vival been very active in the cause of religion, and promised to be 
a man of great usefulness ; he is a boy of great influence, and he 
has gone back. He does not oppose religion, but wishes that he 
had it. His going back has caused a great deal of sorrow here 
among the boys who profess to be pious. 

" I room with Homes at present ; he is, I think, very amiable 
and pious. We have prayers together every evening. Then he 
has an hour in the morning and I an hour in the evening for pri- 



IOO BIOGRAPHY OF 

vate devotions. I find that if I neglect prayer even once that I 
do not desire to pray again as much as I did before, and the 
more I pray the more I love to do it. 

" At present I am comparing the Evangelists together, and 
looking up the passages in the Old which are referred to in the 
New Testament. 

" Charles and I correspond regularly. In order to make it 
profitable as well as interesting, we have in every letter some 
difficult passage for one another to explain. I like the plan very 
much. 

" Our examination is over, and exhibition also. I send you 
one of our papers (published at the institution), which has a 
scheme of the exhibition. I got through my examinations very 
well. I hope that you will find time to answer this soon. Give 
my best love to any of the family who may be in Boston, and 
Aunt Homes's family. 

"Your affec. brother, 

"H. W. Beecher." 

In another one to the same, dated August, 1829, he says : 

" My dear Brother : 

"I received your letter Sabbath eve. I expect father re- 
ceived a letter from me about the same time that you did this 
one, in which I asked him to explain some things from the Bible 
to me. . . . While I think of it, Mr. Newton explains the Bible 
twice a week now instead of once. He presses the boys to the 
study of the Bible and to prayer more than any minister I ever 
knew, and I believe it to be not without effect. I, for one, have 
read my Bible more and studied it more. Father recommended 
me to keep a little book in which I should put all my loose 
thoughts. I got one about a month since and have filled a good 
deal of it already. My studies go pretty well. At present I am 
studying Cicero and the Greek reader. I expect next term (in 
about five weeks) to take up the Greek Testament, and Virgil, 
and mathematics. I intend to stay here another year, almost for 
no other purpose than to learn mathematics, it is taught so well 
here ! I exercise three hours in a day. One of the questions 
which I wished to ask you is this, Matthew ii. 23 : ' That it 
might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets : He shall 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECHER. \ o I 

be called a Nazarene." Mr. Newton gave one explanation, but 
it did not satisfy me. I have been and am still reading Dr. 
Gregory's letters on the evidences, doctrines, and duties of the 
Christian religion. 

" I intend to spend a part of my vacation (which will com- 
mence soon) in Hartford. I do not exactly understand the doc- 
trine of predestination, and several boys have been to me and 
asked me to explain it to them, but I could never do it to my 
own satisfaction. I am paying a considerable attention to elocu- 
tion, reading, etc. 

" I wish to ask you concerning w^z^Z-reading. I know that 
to read much of any such thing is bad, but do you think that 
it would injure me to read now and then those of Scott and 
Cooper ? Write soon as possible. 

Your affec. brother, 

"Henry." 

The following letter, written near the close of his school-life, 
affords a view of some of his troubles, and is given entire : 

"Mount Pleasant, Mar. i, 1830. 
" My dear Sister : 

" I received your letter yesterday and have got up about an 
hour earlier this morning in order that I may have time to an- 
swer it. My studies are growing more and more difficult, for I 
am preparing for examination, and most of the Greek which I 
am reviewing I have never been over, and I have to learn some- 
thing like ten pages. Sometimes I feel almost discouraged, and 
if I was studying for myself alone I should have given up long 
ago ; but when I think that I am preparing myself to bear the 
commands of Him who is my Master, I can go with re- 
newed strength from day to day. A little time spent here in 
performing our duty, and then our toil and trouble will be re- 
warded with double and eternal happiness. I feel just as you 
do while writing or thinking of these things — I feel drawn up 
toward heaven, my home, and am enabled to look upon the earth 
as a place of pilgrimage and not an abiding city. Those are 
moments of true happiness, which the world knows not ; but 
when I mix with the boys I forget these things, and do talk and 
act unworthy of a disciple of Christ. I find this to need much 



102 BIOGRAPHY OF 

watchfulness and prayer, for I believe that I take to light 
trifling more than people generally do. I find much trouble with 
pride. I am afraid every day that I shall get into some difficulty 
with my instructors. I feel more at liberty when I write to you 
than any other of my sisters ; not because I do not love them, but 
because you are nearer my age. I notice many things in reading 
your letter which struck me as exactly like my own feelings. I 
feel when in meeting, or when reading any book, as if I should 
never cease serving Christ, and could run with patience the race 
which is set before me. Oh ! then I have such thoughts, such 
views of God, and of His love and mercy, that my heart would 
burst through the corrupt body of this world and soar up with 
angels. Oh ! how happy the thought that we may in all the 
ages of eternity serve and enjoy the presence of that God, the very 
glimpses of whom fill us with such joy here. I believe that if I 
had not somewhere to lay my troubles, if Christ had not invited 
all those that are ' weary and heavy laden ' to come unto Him, 
that I should have long since been discouraged, for I do not 
think that my instructors do right with me ; for although they 
know that my lessons are double those of any other boy, still 
they scold and ridicule me during recitation, and, what is worse, 
the principals will at the close of the week, when the reports are 
read, read off my reports and all the remarks which are made 
of me by the under-instructors, and yet will not even say {I can 
say it with my whole heart) that I exert myself all in my power. 
And the deficiency is not for want of study. Nevertheless, if it 
will do me any good, if it will break down my proud spirit, if it 
will make me depend more upon help from above than earthly 
help, I will suffer it — yes, rejoice in it. 

" I write to you, Harriet, just as I would speak with you ; and 
if it seems to you that I am childish in feeling thus, I can say per- 
haps I may be, but there are feelings which I have long had, and 
have wished to relate to some one whom I loved and who could 
advise me. I have said little or nothing to any of my schoolmates 
concerning these things. You inquired something concerning 
card-playing, etc. I don't know what to think about it. I believe 
that there are little societies which meet at certain places for the 
purpose of playing. It is not among the large boys only, but 
among those of ten or twelve years of age, and most all the boys 
say ' they would not play, because it is forbidden by Mr. Colton ; 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. \o\ 

\j 

but they don't think there is any harm in it any more than there 
is in playing chess.' Mr. Colton knows that the boys play, and 
all that he has found out he has punished in some way or other ; 
but there are many that he has not found who still continue to 
play in secret places, and it is not uncommon to hear little 
boys of eight or nine years old swearing most shockingly. 

11 The bell is ringing and I must begin my studies now. Write 
soon. Your most affectionate brother, 

"Henry. 

" P. S. Will you send me a few questions that will be good 
for a debating society ? We wish to get the best one we can for 
a public debate." 

Occasionally in some moment of frolicsome reminiscence he 
would tell one of his grandchildren of another kind of experience 
that belonged to these days. Bashful as he was and retiring by- 
nature, he was not by any means proof against the tender passion 
— in fact, such a nature as his was just the one that its arrows 
would reach the earliest, and into which they would strike deepest. 

She was the sister of a schoolmate, and her name was Nancy. 
All this vacation he had developed great fondness for this school 
friend ; was often at his house. "And there," he said, "I would 
lean against the window and watch Nancy sew, sbe had such lit- 
tle pink fingers — how I wanted to take hold of them ! And then 
once in a while she would just glance up, and I would be covered 
with hot and awkward confusion." 

On one evening in particular he had spruced up his dress and 
screwed up his courage preparatory to making an evening call, 
when, as the family sat around the fire, " Lyman," said the mo- 
ther, without looking up from her lace knitting, " Mount Pleasant 
is an excellent school. Henry is improving very much. He has 
grown tidy, blacks his boots and brushes his hair, and begins to 
pay a proper attention to his clothes." 

" At this point," says Mr. Beecher, in telling the story, 
" Charles gave an explosive giggle and punched me slyly. Fa- 
ther lowered his newspaper ; glancing over his glasses in our di- 
rection, seeing me covered with confusion and Charles full of 
suppressed laughter, said dryly : 

" ' Oh ! it is the school, is it ? Humph ! I guess the cause is 
nearer home. ' " 

" How did it turn out, grandpa ?" 



104 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" Oh ! she was older than I, and married another fellow soon 
after. A short time ago, after a lecture in Boston, a little old 

lady introduced herself to me as ' Nancy .' But the charm 

was gone. I shook the once tempting hand and felt neither 
awkward nor hot." 

To some of his letters of this school-boy era he signs the 
initials H. C. B. instead of H. W. B. The adoption of this 
letter C came about from that enthusiasm of friendship which 
was always one of his marked characteristics. The following is 
the history of the matter : 

On the back of a sheet of letter-paper which we have before 
us, folded as if for filing, is written : 

" Henry W. Beecher 
& 

CONSTANTINE F. NEWELL, 

Mount Pleasant Collegiate Institution, 
Amherst, Mass." 
Opening it we read : 

" We do, in the presence of God and his holy angels, by our 
signatures, mutually pledge ourselves to be and perform all things 
subjoined : 

"(i) We do pledge ourselves to be real, lawful, and everlast- 
ing brothers ; and that we will perform toward each other all the 
duties of brothers, whether present or absent, in health or in 
sickness, in wealth or in poverty, in prosperity or adversity ; and 
that we will love and watch over one another, seeking by all 
means in our power to aid and make each other happy. 

" H. C. Beecher, 

"CONSTANTINE F. NEWELL. 

"(2) If parted hereafter we pledge ourselves to write to one 
another once in two months, provided we are both in the United 
States. But if either shall remove or reside in any foreign land, 
we will write four times each year, that is, once in three months, 
unless we shall alter the arrangement. 

"H. C. Beecher, 

"CONSTANTINE F. NEWELL. 

" (3) If we hear one another's character evil spoken of, "we 
pledge ourselves fearlessly to defend it and shield it from re- 
proach. " H. C. Beecher, 

"CONSTANTINE F. NEWELL. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 1 05 

" (4) We will pass over the little faults which we may observe 
in each other, nor will we reproach one another of any little 
misstep. [Signatures omitted here.] 

" (5) Our sorrows and joys shall be common, so that we may 
rejoice in mutual prosperity and assist one another in adversity. 

" H. W. Beecher, 

"CONSTANTINE F. NEWELL. 

" And now we consider ourselves as brothers, and we are 
bound together by ties and obligations as strong as can be placed 
upon us. But we rather rejoice in the relationship, as now 
it has converted our former friendship into brotherly love. As 
formerly we were connected by nothing save voluntary friend- 
ship, which could be broken off, so now we are connected by a 
love which cannot be broken ; and we have pledged ourselves be- 
fore God and his angels to be as written above. But we do not 
sorrow on this account — far from it, we greatly rejoice — for we 
have not done this thoughtlessly, but being convinced by three 
years friendship that we mutually love one another ; and from 
this time are now assumed new duties and obligations. And 
to all the foregoing we cheerfully and voluntarily subscribe our 
names. And now may God bless us in this our covenant and 
in all our future ways, and receive us both at last in heaven. 

" H. C. Beecher, 

"CONSTANTINE F. NEWELL. 

" Amherst, April, 1832." 

The explanation of this singular paper is found in a very 
romantic history and friendship. 

Constantine Fontellachi was a Greek from the island of Scio, 
in the Grecian Archipelago. His parents were killed by the 
Turks in that terrible massacre of the Sciotese which horrified 
the world in 1822. Constantine, who was six or eight years old, 
escaped and hid among the rocks upon the coast until he was 
discovered and taken off by a coasting vessel. He made his 
way to the New World and was adopted by Mrs. Newell, of 
Amherst, as her own, and sent to the Mount Pleasant school. 
His romantic but sorrowful history, his great beauty and grace 
of person, captivated Henry Ward ; as he said : " He was the 
most beautiful thing I had ever seen. He was like a young 



106 BIOGRAPHY OF 

Greek god. When we boys used to go swimming together I 
would climb out on the bank to watch Constantine swim, he 
was so powerful, so beautiful." 

The brightness of his intellect and his kindliness of heart 
were equal to the beauty of his person, and the admiration 
excited deepened into the warmest and most sincere affection. 
It was like that between David and Jonathan, and appears to 
have been mutual. 

When they separated at the close of their school-days, one 
to enter college and the other to go into business in Boston, the 
above covenant was written; admirable only as it illustrates what 
has been called Mr. Beecher's genius for friendship. Return- 
ing to his native land in 1842, Constantine died very suddenly 
of cholera. But even then the old friendship was not forgotten. 
Years after Mr. Beecher gave to one of his sons " Constantine " 
as a middle name, that he might have in his family one who 
should always remind him of the friend so greatly beloved. 

We close this chapter with a letter of reminiscence of Mount 
Pleasant days. 

"Amherst, Mass., May 17, 1849. 
" My dear Eunice and very dear Wife : 

" Here am I in this memorable place. It is now fifteen years 
since you received a letter from me dated as is this one. It is 
twenty- three years since I first put my foot on the village sod! It 
gives my head a whirl to look back so far, or to hear myself, with my 
young-looking face and younger-acting one, talking of things that 
happened to me at such long distances of time. . . . Arrived at 
Northampton about four o'clock; took stage for Amherst, mount- 
ed on top for sight-seeing. Rode through the old town along 
by the ploughed fields to the bridge of memorable history. All 
our experiences came very freshly back. I thought I could tell 
the very places where I kissed you in our ride home. . . . 

" After emerging from this old town (Hadley) the colleges 
shone out from afar ; then Mount Pleasant gradually, and one by 
one the various prominent dwellings in the village. I put up at 
the Baltwoods' old tavern. ... I first went to the college; walk- 
ed up and down and around in the various entries, in the grove, 
by the well, in the chapel, in each recitation-room. Then I 
went to each of the rooms which I occupied in college. I sought 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECIIER. \OJ 

out the spots which had a very melancholy interest from events 
in my morbid religious history. I then turned my steps to Mount 
Pleasant. I cannot tell the emotions that I had when I once more 
trod the grassy ascent where my opening manhood first fairly 
dawned. As I walked up the long slope I almost thought that 
I should see the crowd of boys break forth from some door. I 
stopped on the terrace where for three years I mustered with 
more than a hundred boys, and whence we marched to chapel, to 
meals, to church, etc. As I stood there Constantine seemed to 
rise up to greet me, as he never will greet me ; Hunt, Pomeroy, 
French, Burt, Thayer, Tilghman, Dwight, Van Lennep, Fitz- 
gerald, and scores of others. The wings of the building, the 
chapel, the kitchen, etc., were all taken away, so that the places 
where most I roomed, and the veranda in which I used to sit and 
muse and feel the rise and swell of yearnings the meaning of 
which I did not know, are all swept away. Here I spent the 
half-ideal and half-emotive, dreamy hours in which I used to 
look across the beautiful Connecticut River valley, and at the 
blue mountains that hedged it in, until my heart swelled and 
my eyes filled with tears ; why, I could not tell. Then I 
would push out into the woods and romp with the wildest of 
them. I visited the grove, once beautiful, now meagre and for- 
lorn. I went into the rear building; each room brought up some 
forgotten scene, some face remembered for good or ill. I went 
to the room where I roomed early in my course. The boys 
were at supper, and so I sat down and meditated awhile. The 
room in which I lived with Fitzgerald was not to be found, 
some changes in the interior of the house having shut it out 
from the entry where I formerly found it. It was a strange mix- 
ture of old things found again and old things not to be found — 
of surprise and disappointment, of things painful and of things 
joyful. All my favorites, the little fellows that I used to love and 
cherish, their faces looked out at me at every turn. I tried to 
find the trees, growing three from a root, on which I made steps 
and built a slat house up among the branches ; where I used to 
sit wind-rocked and read or muse, cry and laugh, just as the 
fancy took me. It was gone. There are twenty-five boys here 
at a select school. They were playing down on the old foot- 
ball ground, and the voices and shouts, quips and jokes, were 
so natural that I could hardly help plunging down the hill, 



108 REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 

catching up a club, and going into the game of ball with all my 
old ardor. But they would have no remembrances to meet 
mine. I should not have been Hank Beecher to them. . . . 
Good-by, dear wife. 

" Truly yours, 

" H. W. B. 
"Love to all the children, big and little." 
For the benefit of all school-boys we call attention to some of 
the most marked features of this period in the life of H. W. 
Beecher, as they appear from the extracts given and from other 
papers for which we have no space. He was healthy and robust, 
a favorite among the boys upon the play-ground, who called him 
" Hank " Beecher. He was a leader in their sports, and at the 
same time a champion of the younger and weaker boys. He 
learned to master his work, and by drill in school-room and 
gymnasium gained control of his own powers of body and mind. 
He kept his eyes open to the beauty of the world around him, 
and was very susceptib.le to the attractions of fair faces as well. 
He was open and manly in following his religious convictions, 
clean-mouthed and pure-hearted in his morals. He pondered 
big matters, and asked large questions, and sought out satisfac- 
tory conclusions for himself and for his companions. He looked 
for information in all directions, and took great pains to store 
it away for future use. He read good books and a great many 
of them, and the novels he read were of the best kind. Withal 
he was a " hail-fellow-well-met " companion and a most devoted 
and faithful friend. Upon the authority of every word of testi- 
mony we have been able to get from teachers, classmates, and 
old residents of the town, we declare him to have been a royal 
school-boy, whose manly faithfulness, kindly service, stalwart 
morality, and loving, cheerful friendliness prepared him for the 
grand life which he afterwards lived and the great success 
which he achieved, and make him a worthy example for all the 
ingenuous, aspiring youth of our land. 



CHAPTER VII. 

Amherst College — Private Journal — Testimony of Classmates — Tutor's 
Delight — Begins his Anti-Slavery Career — Spiritual Darkness — En- 
gagement — Letters of his Mother — Experiences in Teaching School — 
First Sermons — Lecturing — His Reading — The Record. 

HENRY WARD BEECHER entered Amherst College in 
1830 in a class of forty members. Although prepared for 
the Sophomore year, yet, following the advice of his father, 
he entered as a Freshman in the class of '34. On the cover of 
a very commonplace-looking copy-book, brown and yellow with 
age, which we have in our possession, he has written with a 
great many flourishes " Private Journal," and then has added 
with equal emphasis, " Not to be looked into." But since he 
afterwards drew his pen through both clauses, we have taken 
the liberty not only to look but also to make extracts from its 
contents. 

The pages appear to have been written for the most part with 
reference to a correspondence which he was then carrying on 
with his brother Charles, referred to in the previous chapter, 
many of the questions being apparently argued, and incidents in 
the diary noted with him in view. As a whole it forms a rather 
odd mixture of excellent sentiments, religious doctrines, ques- 
tions and arguments, studied illustrations and daily incidents, 
showing an alert mind, and one that, while awake to observe the 
smallest events, was equally ready to grapple with the largest 
subjects. A list of eleven " Tracts French" on half the first page 
is followed on the blank spaces of the remainder with careless 
pen-scrawls in which the name of " Nancy" appears with attempts 
at monograms, showing the pleasant fancies that possessed his 
idle moments. 

" Tracts English" heads the next page, which is ruled for 
names and numbers ; but for some reason, perhaps because the 
list was too great or the selection too difficult, the plan was never 
carried out and not a single entry was made — a failure so human, 
so common, that it at once brings him into the sympathies of 
thousands who remember how often they have done the same 
thing. 

"Occasional Thoughts" comes next, printed with the pen in 

109 



IIO BIOGRAPHY OF 

small caps in the middle of a page, and surrounded with the usual 
artistic pen-decorations. On the opposite page the thoughts be- 
gin. The first is " Proof of a Hell." "I prove first that there 
must be a hell, and then it will appear evident that there must 
be a judgment." Six pages of proof-texts and argument follow, 
when we come to the next question : " Who will enjoy heaven 
most ? " When this has been answered, somewhat more briefly 
than the former, but apparently to his own satisfaction, he opens 
the next subject : 

" I wish to ask you [evidently addressed to his brother], not 
as a question, but for my own information, what you think about 
the devil ? Now, this of itself is quite a curious question, but 
what I wish to ask in this particular is, Do you think that he is 
at all under the divine direction as we are ?" 

Several pages of pithy sayings and illustrations follow, of 
which the first three are fair samples : 

" God's plans are like a hive of bees, for they seem to go on 
without any order till they are accomplished, but then you can 
see a great plan. Each one seems to be pursuing something 
for itself, but, like the bees, they at the end help to form one ele- 
gant edifice." 

" A half-way Christian has too little piety to be happy in the 
next world, and too much to be happy in this." 

" Religion, like fire, will go out nearly as soon if no fuel is 
added to it as if water is poured on it." 

These are not quotations, but original, and show thus early 
a habit already formed and a power already being educated of 
illustrating religious truth by natural objects and processes. 

The last half of the book is used as a diary, written mostly 
with a lead-pencil, and opens with an account of his journey from 
Boston to Hartford on his way to enter college : 

" I started from Boston Tuesday eve at ten o'clock, and, riding 
all night, I arrived in Hartford in time to dine. I took passage 
in the United States mail-stage. It can hold but six passengers 
inside, it being made light in order to travel fast. I think that 
we travelled very fast, for we went one hundred miles in about 
fifteen hours. After I got into Hartford I started off to find 
Mary. I went to her house, and sent word that I wished to see 
Mrs. Perkins. After waiting awhile she came down-stairs, and 
did not know me, and I had to tell her who I was. About five 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 



Ill 



o'clock I went to see Harriet and Catharine. Catharine knew 
me, but Harriet did not. She could not think what to make of 
it when I went up and kissed her. 

" I shall now begin my journal : 

" Catharine wishes me to go to her levee to-night. Don't want 
to much, but conclude that I will. Went before any of the com- 
pany came. Went into Catharine's room and sat till it was time 
to go down. The company began to come in, at first ladies, like 
flocks of pigeons, stringing along through the parlors ; soon also 
the gentlemen began to come in. In the meantime I was sitting 
by the side of the pianoforte, alone and ' unbefriended,' looking 
at the different groups of persons talking. At length Harriet 
came and sat down by me, and I had quite a talk ; but she wish- 
ing me to go with her into the other parlor, where a great many 
young ladies and no gentlemen were sitting, I refused, whereup- 
on she kept pressing me, till at length, when she got up to go and 
speak with some one on the other side of the room, I seized the 
opportunity, and very quickly started for the door, but unluck- 
ily ran against a gentleman, knocked him half-over, made an 
apology, and got into the entry. Nor did my scrape end here ; 
for, getting my hat, I perceived that they saw me from the par- 
lors, and, getting the other side of the entry to hide myself from 
them, I espied six or seven young ladies seated on the stairs, 
watching to see what I was a-going to do. Well, I went back to 
the table where I had taken my hat, and from there whipped 
out of the door. After I had got home I sat and talked with 
Aunt Esther and Mary for a few moments, and then I went out 
to get a lamp. The stairs, I thought, were in this shape • 







but instead of that they were in this way : 





















0, 


* 













112 BIOGRAPHY OF 

You know when they are moved round in that way there are 
four or five steps that meet in one point, a, and branch at b, 
so you cannot step on them except at b. Well, I stepped 
down at a and fell five stairs head-first — stretching my hands 
forward saved my cranium — and tumbled the rest of the way, to 
the no small annoyance of my shins and knees. So much for 
running away from the levee." 

" Catharine and Harriet came to tea, after which I went home 
with them, when Harriet put her curls on to my head and 
her bonnet, Catharine a cloak and neck-handkerchief, and then 
called the young ladies in, and they all thought that I was 
Harriet ; and then, to cap all, Harriet put on a man's cloak and 
my hat, and she looked exactly like you [Charles] ! " 

Such was Henry Ward Beecher at the age of seventeen, on 
the eve of entering college — bashful, smooth-faced, and chang- 
ing rapidly in appearance, so that his own sisters did not know 
him. The penmanship shows as yet an unformed hand, but in 
its main features is like that of a later date. 

He carelessly leaves out a word or a letter here and there, 
and markedly in places continues the old habit of his early school 
days — poor spelling. Nothing appears that indicates any talent 
superior to the majority of young men on their way to college, 
unless it be a certain enthusiasm, straightforwardness, and sim- 
plicity. 

The college at this time was but nine years old, having been 
established in 1821. Rev. Heman Humphrey was president. It 
was small and poorly endowed, as well as young, but the chairs 
of instruction were ably filled ; and since it had been founded by 
the orthodox Congregationalists as, in fact, an antidote to the 
Unitarianism of Harvard, and with especial reference to the 
education of young men for the ministry, its orthodoxy was 
unquestioned and its religious spirit pronounced and active. 

By reason of his excellent preparation and the admirable 
mental training he had received, either of two courses were open 
to Henry Ward. He might aspire to lead his class in scholar- 
ship, become a "high-honor" man, and possibly take the valedic- 
tory, or use the time which he had at his disposal in following 
out those studies and readings that were to his taste. 

He chose the latter, and, while giving sufficient study to the 
college course to preserve a respectable standing in his class, 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECHER. I 1 3 

gave his greatest effort to carrying out his own plan of develop- 
ment and culture. 

" I had acquired by the Latin and mathematics the power of 
study," he says. " I knew how to study, and I turned it upon 
things I wanted to know." 

The beauty of the Greek and Latin classics did not attract 
him ; it seemed cold and far away, belonging to another time and 
another order of mind ; but our English classics, with their 
warmth of feeling, their lofty imagination, their delicate senti- 
ment, their power and eloquence, seemed akin and near to him ; 
they had to do with the present, and he gave himself to their 
study with a whole-hearted enthusiasm that rendered him pecu- 
liarly open to their influences. 

Inspired and fed by them as to what to say, he also gave 
especial attention to the manner of saying it. Rhetoric and 
oratory were diligently pursued throughout his college course. 
In these departments he seems, according to the testimony of 
his class and college mates, to have excelled then almost as mark- 
edly as he has since. 

Says Dr. Thomas P. Field : " The first thing I particularly 
remember about him in college was this : I went into our class 
prayer-meeting on Saturday evening, and young Beecher gave an 
exhortation. He urged us to a higher life and more constant 
activity in religious work. I heard him a great many times after 
he became a famous preacher, but I think I never was more 
moved by his eloquence than in that boys' prayer-meeting. In 
the regular routine of our studies I always was aroused and as- 
tonished by his extemporaneous debates. He surpassed all the 
rest of us then in extemporaneous power of speech as much as he 
did in his after-life. There was where he seemed to me particu- 
larly to excel as a student. In mere recitation of mathematics 
or languages many of us could surpass him, but in extempora- 
neous debates he could beat us all. I was always greatly inter- 
ested, too, in his written essays. We were in the habit of read- 
ing our essays to the professors in the class-room. Your father 
always had something to say that was fresh and striking and 
out of. the beaten track of thought — something, too, that he 
had not gotten from books, but that was the product of his own 
thinking." 

Dr. John Haven, another classmate, says of him : " He was a 



I 14 BIOGRAPHY OF 

great reader, and probably had more general knowledge than any- 
one of his classmates when he graduated." 

Says Lewis Tappan, a classmate : " In logic and class debates 
no one could approach him. I listened to his flow of impassioned 
eloquence in those my youthful days with wonder and admira- 
tion." 

S. Hopkins Emery, another classmate, in answer to a letter, 
writes : " Nobody could be gloomy or desponding near your 
father. He made us all cheerful and happy. Do I remember 
him in college ? Indeed I do — more than I have time to write or 
you patience, perhaps, to read. It seems but yesterday that I 
was reading a composition in the lecture-room of Professor Wor- 
cester. Beecher sat just behind me. I had finished reading, 
when I heard a friendly whisper in my ear : ' Emery, your porch 
is too large for the house.' It was a good criticism. In such 
college studies which had to do with writing and speaking the 
English language your father excelled. The dead languages and 
mathematics never seemed to suit his taste. He might have 
excelled in them if he had been so minded. He was equal to 
anything he undertook. No one was his match in extempora- 
neous talk or debate." 

This power and its exercise upon one memorable occasion 
was fraught, according to a college mate, Rev. S. W. Hanks, 
with very marked consequences : 

"In the annual Sophomore and Freshman fray the former 
found themselves engaged with a force that was more than a 
match for them, and their pranks upon the Freshmen got repaid 
with much more than the usual interest. In consequence of this 
a meeting of all the classes in college was held to protest against 
the barbarities of this customary war, in which the smoke of the 
battle usually found its way into the Freshmen's rooms. At this 
meeting a leading member of the Junior class, finding the Sopho- 
mores a little wanting in courage and speaking talent, volunteered 
to act as their attorney, and made a telling and crushing speech 
against the Freshmen class for their hard handling of the Sopho- 
mores, who had only followed an old custom in their treatment 
of the Freshmen. At the close of this speech by the * leading 
Junior,' Beecher arose and said he wished to say a word on the 
other side, whereupon he ' went for ' the Junior in a speech full 
of wit and point, which altogether \ turned the tables' to the 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. I I 5 

great amusement of all present and the great annoyance of the 
'leading Junior.' When the meeting broke up the Goliah of the 
Junior class found himself suffering from a wound which the little 
smooth stone from the sling of the hitherto unknown Freshman 
had made. This was a new experience for the proud Junior, and 
the wound rankled. 

" It seems never to have been forgotten. Time passed on and 
the * leading Junior ' became a leading lawyer, jurist, judge, and 
Democratic politician, and when the great scandal arose volun- 
teered a very strong argument against Mr. Beecher. It had great 
weight in some quarters, but was less convincing to those parties 
who remembered that this judge was eagerly embracing the first 
opportunity that had offered of paying off an old score of their 
college days." 

" He was whole-souled and hearty, humorous in the extreme 
but without a particle of viciousness, a reformer and an earnest 
man." This is again the testimony of his classmate, Dr. Field. 

" We would often gather on the steps of the chapel, a num- 
ber of us incidentally, and if your father was in the gathering we 
always had much wit and sparkling repartee, and anecdote and 
description, all of which seemed to be infused by your father, 
and of which, indeed, he was the greater part. He always 
seemed full of health and hilarity, and yet, after all, there was a 
prevailing seriousness, an earnest purpose, a determination to 
be a good and true man. I never knew anything of him but 
what was good, and great, and orderly, and becoming a Christian. 
I have heard persons say he was wild in college. Nothing more 
untrue. I never heard him utter a word, and never heard of 
his doing a deed, that was contrary to the rules of morality 
and propriety. He would criticise some things in college studies, 
etc. I remember his maintaining very decidedly that the study 
of mathematics was not a good discipline for the mind, but he 
never set himself against college rules of order. He was a strong 
temperance man, and was very bold to rebuke his fellow-students 
in anything he thought to be wrong." 

Of his social and humorous qualities Mrs. Stowe says : 

" In fact, Mr. Beecher was generally the centre of a circle of 
tempestuous merriment, ever eddying round him in one droll form 
or another. 

" He was quick in repartee, an excellent mimic, and his sto- 



1 1 6 BIOGRAPHY OF 

ries would set the gravest in a roar. He had the art, when ad- 
monished by graver people, of somehow entrapping them into 
more uproarious laughing than he himself practised, and then 
looking innocently surprised. 

" Mr. Beecher on one occasion was informed that the head 
tutor of the class was about to make him a grave exhortatory 
visit. The tutor was almost seven feet high, and as solemn as an 
Alpine forest. But Mr. Beecher knew that, like most solemn 
Yankees, he was at heart a deplorable wag, a mere whited sepul- 
chre of conscientious gravity, with measureless depths of unre- 
newed chuckle hid away in the depths of his heart. When ap- 
prised of his approach he suddenly whisked away into his closet 
the chairs of his room, leaving only a low one which had been 
sawed off at the second joint, so that it stood about a foot from 
the floor. Then he crawled through the hole in that study-table 
which he had made after a peculiar plan of his own, and, seated 
meekly among his books, awaited the visit. 

" A grave rap is heard. ' Come in.' Far up in the air the 
solemn dark face appears. Mr. Beecher rose ingenuously and 
offered to come out. ' No, never mind,' says the visitor ; 'I just 
came to have a little conversation with you. Don't move.' 

" ' Oh ! ' says Beecher innocently, ' pray sit down, sir,' indicat- 
ing the only chair. 

" The tutor looked apprehensively, but began the process of 
sitting down. He went down, down, down, but still no solid 
ground being gained, straightened himself up and looked uneasy. 

" ' I don't know but that chair is too low for you ; do let me 
get you another,' said Beecher meekly. 

" ' Oh ! no, my young friend, don't rise, don't trouble yourself ; 
it is perfectly agreeable to me ; in fact, I like a low seat.' And 
with these words the tall man doubled up like a jack-knife, and 
was seen sitting with his grave face between his knees, like a 
grasshopper drawn up for a spring. He heaved a deep sigh and 
his eyes met the eyes of Mr. Beecher ; the hidden spark of na- 
tive depravity within him was exploded by one glance at those 
merry eyes, and he burst into a loud roar of merriment, which 
the two continued for some time, greatly to the amusement of 
the boys who were watching to hear how Beecher would come 
out with his lecture. The chair was known thereafter as the 
' Tutor's Delight.' " 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. I I 7 

He carried his usual sports with him into college life. " On 
Saturday afternoons," says Lewis Tappan, "we often revisited the 
woods in the rear of our former home, on which occasion your 
father would climb the tallest trees and place a pillow-case over 
the holes where the flying squirrels were. I on the ground 
rapped the trees, startling the inmates, who were caught in their 
efforts to escape. 

" Botanical and geological specimens were collected on the way, 
and in his room your father had a good collection of the latter." 

He joined a club of eight who boarded a mile from college, 
that the going and returning for their meals might give them six 
miles of exercise a day. This was done in part to save expense, 
the board being cheaper at that distance from the village. He 
also walked from college to Boston, more than a hundred miles, 
on his vacations, for the same reason. Yet, with all his care in 
economy, and although his board cost him but $1.50 a week, it 
was thought at one time impossible to keep him in college on 
account of the expense, as this letter, written by a friend of the 
family during his Freshman year, will explain : 

" While Henry and Charles were in college your father and 
mother felt very much straitened for money. One evening par- 
ticularly they were talking about it, and did not know what they 
should do to keep the boys along. At last your father said : 
' Well, the Lord always has taken care of me, and I am sure he 
always will.' The mother lay awake, she told me afterwards, 
and cried. She cried because she did not see how they should 
get along ; but what most troubled her was that her husband had 
so much faith and she had not any. 

" The next morning was Sabbath morning. Some one rang 
at the door, and a letter was handed in containing a $100 bill 
and no name. They came up to tell me, as they always did, but 
they did not know, nor I then, who gave it. I found out after- 
wards it was Mr. Homes — a thank-offering at the conversion of 
one of his children." 

The following letter, written near the close of his Freshman 
year, shows the bent of his mind at this period : 

" My dear Sister : 

" I write principally to tell you that I have sent the ' Book of 
Nature,' and that it is probably at the stage-house. 



I 1 8 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" But I want to consult you on a plan that I have formed — 
for I possess real Beecher blood in the matter of planning. It is 
this : In my six weeks' vacation, and in the four weeks' one, I 
mean to attach myself as some kind of agent to the Bible, or 
Tract, or Education, or some other society, wherever I can, and 
travel round to the small towns at a distance, and collect funds 
or distribute Bibles and tracts, or something like that, or do 
something or other — of course I can't tell what they may want 
me to do. 

" I shall in a month or two be eighteen years old, and I think 
that that is old enough to begin to do something. I can get 
letters of the president and professors here and of gentlemen of 
Boston to establish my mission, so that folks will not think that 
I am collecting for my own purposes under the name of some 
society. Will you write to me about it ? Tell C. that I have 
engaged one to hear me recite botany. I am going to establish 
a daily prayer-meeting here, and pray for a revival. Pray for 
us, too. Mount Pleasant is in a very bad state. Lotteries are 
here without number — five dollars is the highest prize — and 
books and everything else, morals and all, are going, I believe, 
and the masters (blind fellows) know nothing of it, although one 
of the monitors handed in to Mr. Fellowes a lottery scheme in- 
stead of his report in the division. 

" Give my love to Mary and husband, Catherine, Cos. Eliza- 
beth, and all who care for me, taking a goodly portion to your- 
self. Your Brother, 

"H. C. B." 

Lest we get a stronger impression of his sanctity at this time 
than the facts would warrant, we add this incident, related by 
himself, of one of his vacation experiences in Boston that has in 
it a very decided flavor of humorous and unsanctified humanity : 
" Looking for a friend, I rapped at the door where I thought he 
lived. The door stuck, but at last flew open after a good deal 
of tugging from the other side, and a ver^ red-faced woman ap- 
peared and asked in a very cross tone what I wanted. ' Does 

Mr. live here ? ' I asked very meekly. ' No, he don't ! ' 

snapped the woman, and slammed the door in my face. I 
thought I would teach her a lesson ; so, after I had walked a little 
ways to give her time to get to work, I went back and rapped 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 



II 9 



again as if I wanted to tear the knocker off. And when the 
same woman opened the door I shouted at the top of my voice, 
* Who said he did? ' and then turned and walked away. When I 
reached the corner the woman was still gazing after me in 
amazed silence." 

It was at Amherst that young Beecher began his anti-slavery 
career, as he tells us in his sermon upon the death of Wendell 
Phillips : 

" Fif^y years ago, during my college life, I was chosen by the 
Athenian Society to debate the question of African colonization, 
which then was new, fresh, and enthusiastic. . . . Fortunately I was 
assigned to the negative side of the question, and in preparing to 
speak I prepared my whole life. I contended against colonization 
as a condition of emancipation — enforced colonization was but 
little better than enforced slavery — and advocated immediate 
emancipation on the broad ground of human rights. I knew 
but very little then, but I knew this, that all men are designed of 
God to be free, a fact which ought to be the text of every man's 
life — this sacredness of humanity as given of God, redeemed from 
animalism by Jesus Christ, crowned and clothed with rights that 
no law nor oppression should dare touch." 

Of his religious life at this period we give the story in his own 
words : 

" When I went to college there was a revival there, in which I 
was prodigiously waked up. I was then about seventeen years 
old, and I had begun to pass from boyhood to manhood, but I 
was yet in an unsettled state of mind. I had no firm religious 
ground to stand upon. I was beginning to slough hereditary 
influences without being able to take on more salutary influences, 
and I went through another phase of suffering which was far 
worse than any that I had previously experienced. It seemed as 
though all the darknesses of my childhood were mere puffs to 
the blackness which I was now passing through. My feeling was 
such that if dragging myself on my belly through the street had 
promised any chance of resulting in good I would have done it. 
No man was so mean that I was not willing to ask him to pray 
for me. There was no humiliation that I would not have sub- 
mitted to ten thousand times over if thereby I could have found 
relief from the doubt, perplexity, and fear which tormented me. 

" I went to Dr. Humphrey in my darkness of soul and said : 



I 20 BIOGRAPHY OF 

* I am without hope and am utterly wretched, and I want to be a 
Christian.' He sat and looked with great compassion upon me 
(for he was one of the best men on earth ; if there is a saint in 
heaven Dr. Humphrey is one), and said : * Ah ! it is the Spirit of 
God, my young man ; and when the Spirit of God is at work 
with a soul I dare not interfere.' And I went away in blacker 
darkness than I came, if possible. 

" I went to an inquiry-meeting which Professor Hitchcock was 
conducting, and when he saw me there he said : ' My friends, I 
am so overwhelmed with the consciousness of God's presence in 
this room that I cannot speak a word.' And he stopped talking, 
and I got up and went out without obtaining rescue or help. 

" Then I resorted to prayer, and frequently prayed all night — 
or should have done so if I had not gone to sleep ; I tried a great 
many devices ; I strove with terrific earnestness and tremendous 
strength ; and I remember that one night, when I knelt before 
the fire where I had been studying and praying, there came the 
thought to my mind : ' Will God permit the devil to have charge 
of one of his children that does not want to be deceived ? ' and 
in an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God's taking 
care of those who put their trust in him that for an hour all the 
world was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and I sprang to my 
feet and began to cry and laugh ; and, feeling that I must tell 
somebody what the Lord had done for me, I went and told Dr. 
Humphrey and others. 

" I endeavored, from that time out, to help those who were in 
trouble of mind like that in which I had been whelmed ; and yet 
I was in a sort of half-despair." 

It was in one of these half-despairing moods, doubtless, that 
he sought counsel from Moody Harrington, of whose piety and 
wisdom in directing inquirers he has often spoken. Harrington's 
room-mate writes : 

" It was in the midst of this great religious movement that 
one day Henry Ward Beecher came to our room— how distinctly 
I remember it ! — and, with a countenance betokening a mighty 
pressure upon his spirit, said substantially : ■ Harrington, I am in 
great distress, in spiritual darkness ; I don't think I have any re- 
ligion. I've come to talk with you.' My room-mate took him 
into his bedroom and talked and prayed with him a long time, 
and when the young man came out from that interview his face 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECH ER. I 2 I 

seemed radiant with hope and peace. Years after Beecher had 
become famous he would repeatedly speak of Harrington as hav- 
ing been to him a spiritual helper beyond that of any other man 
he had known." 

His first talk in a religious meeting outside the school or col- 
lege is thus described : 

" I think it must have been late in my Freshman career at 
Amherst College or in my Sophomore. My mind was much stirred 
and distressed at that time on the subject of religion. In the 
class above, one Moody Harrington took much interest in me. 
He was in some respects a remarkable man for profound religious 
feeling, for fervid imagination, and for remarkable eloquence in 
exhortation. He lifted me by his personal sympathy and his 
encouragement out of great despondency and set me on my feet 
with some tremblings of heart. On one occasion he asked me to 
walk with him one evening to Logtown to a little prayer and con- 
ference meeting. After Harrington had spoken for a while he 
turned to me all unexpectedly and asked me to make some re- 
marks. I was confounded. I rose and said something — I do not 
know what, nor did I quite know then, for everything was whirl- 
ing darkness while I was speaking, but it was the letting out of 
waters. I never ride past the Dwight house without going out of 
the cars to look over the place and to bring back to memory that 
dismal night, and that dismal speech, and the dismal walk back 
to college, ashamed and silent." 

Another important event took place in his Sophomore year, 
January 2, 1832. He became engaged to Eunice White Bullard. 
daughter of Dr. Artemas Bullard, of West Sutton, Mass. Of this 
event, the preceding and succeeding acquaintance, our dear 
mother has written in a paper entitled "Looking Back," of which 
she says : " Of course all this is no help to you in preparing your 
father's life, but I sit and dream of the past and write just as it 
rises before me, as fresh as if but yesterday, hoping by doing so 
something may come to me that will be of service to you." 

We shall give her notes just as she has written them, leaving 
it for our readers to judge whether or not they are of any service: 

" LOOKING BACK. 

"Fifty-seven years ago last May, 1831, my brother Ebenezer, 
then in his Freshman year in Amherst College, wrote : • The 



I 2 2 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

term closes this week. I shall walk home (fifty miles), and would 
like to bring two of my classmates with me. We shall start be- 
fore the sun and hope to be with you by supper-time. Don't be at 
any more trouble than if there were three Ebenezers coming home.' 

" No ; of course not ! Sickness in the village made it im- 
possible to get help that summer, and mother and I were doing 
the work alone for a very large family, so large that a half-dozen 
more or less made little difference. 

" In good time for supper, weary and travel-soiled, my brother 
and his two friends made their appearance : one a tall, very 
dark-complexioned gentleman,' the other a very verdant-looking 
youth, a Freshman of not quite eighteen — an age when one is 
prepared to find a young man awkward and painfully embar- 
rassed, and to look with dismay on the prospect of trying to en- 
tertain and make him comfortable. 

" But even then the roguish mouth, the laughing, merry eyes, 
the quaint humor and quick repartee, very soon put all such 
anxiety to flight. This was Henry Ward Beecher as I first saw 
him. Truth to tell, an exceedingly homely young man. But, in 
youth or old age, who ever thought of that, or, thinking, believed 
it after being with him an hour? Before that first evening was 
ended none of the family thought of him as a stranger ; he 
was thoroughly at home with all. There were truly ' only three 
Ebenezers there,' each equally ready for quiet conversation, mu- 
sic, fun, repartee, or teasing ; but the youngest of the three was 
the most expert in the latter accomplishment. 

"After our outside work was done mother and I took knit- 
ting and sewing and sat down with them. I was going to wind a 
skein of sewing-silk (that was before spools were common), and, 
as was my custom, put it over the back of a chair. More gal- 
lant and thoughtful, apparently, than his older companions, this 
young gentleman insisted upon holding it for me to wind. For 
some reason — perfectly unaccountable if one judged only by his 
quiet, innocent face, without watching the eyes and mouth — that 
skein became as intricately tangled as if tied by Macbeth's 
witches. 'A badly tangled skein, is it not?' said he, when I had 
lost half my evening in getting it wound. ' Rather more trouble- 
some, I imagine, than if I had kept it on the chair,' I replied. 
' It was a good trial of patience, anyhow,' was his response to the 
laugh that followed. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. I 23 

" Even my quiet mother was not exempt from some of his 
mirthful sallies, but he carried, in all his fun, such an inexhaust- 
ible store of gentleness and good-humor that I think she really 
enjoyed it. Often in after-years she used to say that Henry 
always made her feel young again. 

" My father had been called out some distance to see a 
patient and had not yet met the ' three Ebenezers,' but came 
in just as we were all laughing heartily at some story Henry had 
told. He stood in the doorway, tall, dignified, and somewhat 
stern. When at last we became conscious of his presence 
brother at once came forward and introduced his classmates. 
Father received them courteously, but a little of the sternness 
still lingered on his face as he took the chair which, without the 
least appearance of boldness, somehow young Mr. Beecher was 
the first to bring him, yet in no way seeming to put himself for- 
ward. Little by little the same subtle influence that had per- 
vaded the whole evening's enjoyment began to steal over father. 
The little cloud seen at first vanished, and long before it was 
time to retire my father was telling stories and Henry following 
with another as freely as if they had been boys together. 

" The others joined, but it was to young Beecher that father 
was most drawn. When the ' good-nights ' were said, and while 
I went to the dairy to make some preparations for breakfast, 
father and mother took counsel together about the work for the 
morrow and various matters ; but just as I returned father was 
saying: 'He's smart. If he lives he'll make his mark in the 
world.' 'Who, father?' I asked. 'Why, young 'Beecher.' 
(But father didn't quite like the ' mark ' he made a few months 
later — ' Nothing but a boy ! ') 

' The visit was prolonged some days, and there was no end 
to the fun and frolic. Your father was constantly investigating, 
and by no means lacked assistance from my brother and his 
other more demure classmate, who, however, stayed only part 
of the time. 

" Mother and I were necessarily much of the time busy in the 
kitchen, milk-cellar, dairy, etc., but these young collegians found 
those places most attractive. The gentle way mother smiled at 
all the younger one's mischievous pranks was a source of per- 
petual delight to him. He always said he fell in love with my 
mother, and, not being able to get her, took up with me. 



124 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" One day, in taking out the bread, pies, etc., from the old- 
fashioned brick oven with the long-handled shovel, she dropped 
some ashes on one of the pies, and called me from the dairy to 
get it off while she removed other articles. Your father sprang 
forward. ' No, no; I will get it off for you,' and, respectfully tak- 
ing it from her hands, the three, without her seeing the mischief, 
marched off with it into the garden, and, seating themselves 
under a big apple-tree, ate it all up. This labor of love accom- 
plished, the others rather held back from proclaiming it, but your 
father demurely walked in and handed mother the empty plate, 
saying : ' There ! see, we have cleaned the plate nicely ! ' 

" One evening your uncle told him one of their classmates was 

engaged to Miss . ' I don't believe it,' said young Beecher. 

' She knows nothing about singing, and I am sure F would 

never marry one who did not. I know I never would marry 
a woman who could not sing.' Short-sighted mortal ! In 
the evening brother asked him to get his flute and have some 
music. He did so, and after a short time asked me to sing. I 
replied: ' I can't ; I never sang a note in my life.' 

" In the summer and fall after first meeting your father I 
taught school in Clappville, South Leicester, Mass., and at the 
commencement of his fall vacation at Amherst Henry found it 
necessary to go from Amherst to Boston (thinking it shorter, per- 
haps /) via Clappville, and entered my school-room just as I was 
dismissing the school for the day. He spent the evening at 
Brother Jones's, where I was boarding, and, incidentally of 
course, remarked that he understood I was intending to visit my 
aunt in Whitingsville during the winter. I replied that after my 
school closed I was thinking of having a play-spell before taking 
another, and might be there at least through December. 

" After my school closed, while spending some time at home 
before my visit to my aunt, he called at father's, and incidentally 
(again) remarked that he had been requested to teach the town 
school in Northbridge, and was to board at a Mr. Fletcher's 
(Whitingsville was only a part of Northbridge, and he knew it all 
the time). 

" 'Why,' said my father, 'that's where Eunice will be. Now, 
child, you have been teasing to go to some academy this winter 
and go on with your Latin, but,' turning to the demure, quiet- 
looking young man, who had not seemed to pay any attention 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. ] 25 

to what was going on — ' but she has overworked the past few 
months, and I won't let her go to school. Perhaps, as you are 
to board at her aunt's and she will be there a short time, you 
might give her some help if she is in trouble with her Latin ! ' 
Strange as it may seem, he didn't appear to feel it an intrusion, 
but professed himself as very ready to render me any service. 
Even my clear-sighted mother saw nothing out of the way in fa- 
ther's suggestion. • He was such a boy ! ' as she said afterward. 
Neither did I, as I might have done had he been older ; only, 
even though he was now a Sophomore, I didn't believe he could 
help me much — / who had been a school-ma'am for three terms ! 
And how young and boyish he did look ! But (an after-thought) 
he might, after all, know much more than his looks led us to give 
him credit for. 

" He came to uncle's a week after I did, one Saturday, so as 
to be ready to begin school Monday. That evening (January 2, 
1832) the young teacher, my cousin, a young lad who was to be 
under his care, and myself were all in the parlor writing. Uncle 
and aunt were out calling. He interrupted my writing by ask- 
ing how far I had progressed in Latin. Was I perfect in the 
Latin grammar ? Could I conjugate all the verbs ? etc. I 
thought it a queer way to begin teaching, but I said, ' Oh ! yes ; 
I think so.' ' Suppose you try some of them, and let me see 
how well you understand them.' I laughed to myself, for I was 
sure I knew them perfectly, and rather thought I knew them as 
well as my teacher ; but I respectfully conjugated the verbs as 
he gave them out, and at last, ' Go through the verb " amo." ' 
I did so, soberly, honestly, without a thought of any mischievous 
intentions. I went through it creditably, and was told that the 
lesson was perfect. 

" I then turned to my writing, and soon after he slipped a bit 
of paper on to my writing-desk : ' Will you go with me as mis- 
sionary to the West ? ' A few minutes after my cousin finished 
his studies for the evening and went to bed. Then some few 
short questions ensued and a few shorter answers not necessary 
to repeat. But, as the embarrassment consequent upon such 
abrupt and unexpected questions had somewhat diminished, he 
urged a more decided, definite answer from me personally. Sim- 
ply referring him to my parents did not satisfy him, so I quietly 
remarked : ' Why ! I can't sing, and only a short time since you 



126 BIOGRAPHY OF 

said you would never marry a woman who could not sing !' ' Oh ! 
that was six months ago, and I have changed my mind.' i And 
in six months from now you may change it again.' ' No ! I did 
change it the very minute you said that night that you never 
sang. There is no fear of my changing again.' 

"The next day, Sabbath, uncle's horse shied going to church, 
and tipped us all out of the sleigh ; and Henry was so anx- 
ious to know if I were hurt, paying no attention to others, that 
he awakened uncle's suspicions. 

" That week at the week-day evening meeting (Preparatory 
Lecture) Henry was called to speak, and did wonderfully well, 
to the great surprise of all who heard that ' young lad.' After 
that, while he stayed at Whitingsville, he spoke at almost all 
the evening meetings, and always with increasing surprise and 
acceptance. I do not remember your father's alluding to those 
meetings but once, and that, I think, was to an English friend 
who called when we lived on 'The Heights.' He said, smiling : 
' Whitingsville was my first pastorate. While teaching there 
one winter I spoke there several times and in some other places 
near by.' 

"The next Saturday after giving me that momentous ques- 
tion on that little slip of paper, Henry rode to West Sutton and 
spoke to father and mother, to their infinite surprise. Mother- 
was grieved, but father was very angry. ' Why, you are a couple 
of babies ! You don't know your own minds yet, and won't for 
some years to come,' he repeated over and over again. {Fifty- 
seven years have given ample proof that we did.) But father was 
grieved, mortified, angry that he should have been so blind. 
But who could resist your father when he pleaded in earnest ? 
Mother often spoke of it long after we were married. She said 
it was wonderful how he swayed that strong, proud man, my 
father, who winced at being outgeneralled by a boy. His ex- 
tremely youthful appearance perfectly blinded them both. But 
mother was soon only a listener, charmed by the modest, manly, 
earnest manner, illumined occasionally by flashes of humor, with 
which he opened- his heart to father and finally overcame him. 
From the first Henry's youth and the long engagement was 
father's only objection, and the fear that, as he grew older, he 
would repent of such imprudence. 

" From the first hour father saw him he was drawn to him, 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEE CHER. I 2 J 

and when he left after this conversation, and returned to Whit- 
ingsville, father said : ' Boy as he seems, he will be true to Eunice ; 
I have no fear on that score.' Just before your father came to 
teach several branches he went a few miles out from Amherst and 
gave a lecture, I think on temperance (am not quite sure), for 
which he received five dollars. With it, among other things, he 
bought me Baxter's * Saint's Rest ' — not a usual love-token — and 
some paper that was for me if his suit prospered. On the fly- 
leaf of the little book, in pencil, were the following lines : 

' Take it ; 'tis a gift of love 
That seeks thy good alone ; 
Keep it for the giver's sake, 
And read it for thine own.' 

"Before his next vacation he walked to Brattleboro', Ver- 
mont, gave a lecture, received ten dollars, and then bought our 
engagement-ring, a plain gold ring, which was also my wedding- 
ring. With the remainder he bought books. 

" The three years in college soon passed. We only met once 
in three months — vacations — and there was nothing unusual to 
record. The 'young boy,' 'too young to know what he was 
about,' as we were so often told, went on toward manhood, un- 
shaken by opposition, laughing at all prophecies of inconstancy 
or change, and then we bade farewell for four years while Henry 
went to Lane Seminary, Walnut Hills, Ohio, for his theological 
course." 

Somewhere Father Beecher has described a " Saxon court- 
ship " as " a grave and serious thing. It is a matter of considera- 
tion. I have known a proposal of love to be stated like a propo- 
sition, and calmly argued for and against with far less warmth 
than Luther would have fWt in debating a thesis. Indeed, many 
courtships are like attempts at kindling fires with green wood — a 
few starveling coals are heaped together, a mere spark dances in 
and out upon the inhospitable charcoal, and disappears on one 
side as fast as it appears on the other. But by all manner of 
shavings and bits of paper — mere trinkets, as it were, and billet- 
doux — a slight flame is got up, which strives, with doubtful pros- 
pect, to convert the smoke into blaze. The bellows are called in, 
the fire is fairly driven up to its work, the green sticks begin to 
sizzle at either end; and though at last, when the heat triumphs, 



128 BIOGRAPHY OF 

the fire is large and lasting, the poor fellow that kindled it had 
to work for it." 

Now, we never could bring ourselves to asking direct ques- 
tions, and we do not suppose that we should ever have been any 
wiser if we had ; but, from the references sometimes made to rid- 
ing through covered bridges, from the comical look that would 
come to his face and the blushes that would be sure to come to 
her cheeks when the raillery around the table became hot and 
personal, we were led to believe that this was not their kind. 

On two leaves of his diary, written probably while at his home 
in Boston in the vacation that followed his Freshman year, and 
during the summer in which 'he had made the acquaintance of 
Miss Bullard, we find the following : 

"Sept. 3, 183 1, Sab. morn. — I found the correspondence of . my 
father and own mother this morning, and eagerly sought out her 
letters and read them. O my mother ! I could not help kissing 
the letters. I looked at the paper and thought that her hand had 
rested upon it while writing it. The hand of my mother ! She 
had formed every letter which I saw. She had looked upon that 
paper which I now looked upon. She had folded it. She had 
sent it. But I found out more of her mind than I ever knew be- 
fore ; more of her feelings, her piety. I should think from her 
writings that she was very amiable, lovely, and confiding in her dis- 
position, yet had much dignity. She appeared to have a mind 
very clear, strong, yet not perceptible till brought out by her feel- 
ings. Her letter to father in which she treats of * love to God, 
whether we should love him because he has done us good or not,' 
etc., I was much pleased with. And I could not help observing 
that her letters were superior, more refined and conclusive, than 
the corresponding ones of father's. They corresponded upon 
subjects, it seems, as pride, dress, slande*, etc., etc. Her piety was 
doubted by herself, although no one who reads her description 
of her feelings can doubt for a moment that Christ was found 
within her heart. 

" The letter to father in reply, apparently, to one in which he 
had expressed his feelings toward her and urged for her permis- 
sion to hope for a future union, pleased me much. There was 
much playfulness about it. I thought that I could see that she 
loved him while she was writing it, yet she tried not exactly to 
show it. I should think that at the conclusion she told her feel- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. I 29 

ings frankly, from one line which I saw, but the rest was torn off. 
I suspect that father did it that no one might ever see it." 

In common with many other students of limited means, he 
taught a term of eight weeks during three of the four years of his 
college course, using the winter vacation, which was at first six 
weeks long, and borrowing two weeks from the winter term in 
college. 

Of his experience in Hopkinton and some other matters, espe- 
cially the fear of his friends concerning his engagement, the fol- 
lowing letter to his brother William gives some interesting details : 

" Hopkinton, Friday eve, 1832. 
" My dear Brother : 

"... I know not as you would have had a reply at all if it 
were not for something said on the first page. Now, I supposed 
that my good friends would find out all at once that my engage- 
ment had undermined all my habits of study and was ruining me, 
nor did it surprise me to have you write it. It is all false, as false 
as it can be. No term since I have been in college have I studied 
so much as the last term ; no year accomplished so much as the 
last. I am not anxious, however, to vindicate myself ; I am 
ready to have you all think so, if needful, for I expected it from 
the first. 

" Soon after I began the school some of the boys began to be 
fractious — all of them larger and stronger than myself. Their 
parents set them on, and they determined to carry me out of the 
room. A large fellow disobeyed me before the whole school, and 
persisted in it. They hoped I would thrash him, and then they 
would rise. But I turned him out of the school forthwith. He 
came the next day. I had previously told the committee and 
asked them to take the business out of my hands. They approv- 
ed, but said that they wished I would do it. The next day I saw 
that they had got another great fellow in to help them. I called 
two of the committee in, and then ordered this disobedient boy 
out. He refused, and I took a rule and beat him, and finally 
broke it over his head. He struck at me a number of times and 
I parried them. The large ones then rose. I seized a club of 
wood and struck the boy three times — tore the skin each blow. 
The committee had to take the other fellows to keep them off. I 
then dismissed the school ; told the committee that I should not 
keep the school where I could have them stand by and see such a 



1 :>o BIOGRAPHY OF 

scene without doing something ; that if they would see those 
fellows removed I would go on, if not I would not. They said 
that they would do it if they thought they had power. I settled 
it all very soon by saying that / would not keep the school, and 
set my face as though I would return to Amherst. But the next 
day, Saturday, it rained. The committee liked my school, and 
gave me a good dismission in writing. The scholars were pleased 
for the most part, and through them their parents. They wished 
me much to open a private school. I waited till I found they 
were in earnest, and then opened one, and now am comfortably 
teaching about thirty scholars.. Besides this my time is loaded. 
Sunday noon, Sabbath-school ; Sunday afternoon, five o'clock, I 
have a Bible-class of ladies ; Wednesday and Saturday evenings, 
meetings in the centre of town ; two other evenings in the dis- 
tricts, and, after this, Sunday evening in the vestry. . . . May 
God bless and prosper you. 

" Your affectionate brother, 

" H. W. B." 

Of his preaching at this time he says : 

"My earliest remembered sermons were delivered at North- 
bridge, Mass., where I taught school for three months in 183 1. 
I conducted conference meetings almost every night, and a tem- 
, perance address at Upton, Mass., where old Father Wood was 
pastor, and in his church. In the winter of 1832 I taught school 
in Hopkinton, Mass., and carried on revival meetings every night 
and preached on Sundays. The people were plain and simple 
and liked the effusions. During the winter of 1833 I again 
taught school at Northbridge, and made a formal sermon in a 
chapel over the new store built by Messrs. Whitings." 

It was in his Sophomore year that a number of students, 
Henry Ward among them, invited a college mate who had been 
reading up on phrenology to deliver a lecture upon that subject. 
They did it for a joke, but it ended in Henry Ward's accepting 
this philosophy as the foundation of the mental science which he 
used through life. 

It was during his college course that he began lecturing — that 
mode of communication with the people that afterwards became 
so popular, and in which for so many years he was the ac- 
knowledged leader. His first formal lecture for which he re- 
ceived pay was delivered in Brattleboro', Vt. He was paid ten 



RE V. HEXR Y WARD BEECHER. 1 3 I 

dollars, and walked the whole distance, nearly fifty miles each 
way, that he might have the whole sum to expend as he pleased. 

Speaking of this period, he says : 

" There stands before me a line of battered and worn books — 
English classics. Their history is little to them, but much to me. 
In part it is my own history. I wish I could lay my hand on 
\X\t first book that I ever bought after the dim idea of a library 
began to hover in my mind ! But that book is gone. Here, 
however, are others whose biography I can give. As early as 
1832 I began to buy books — a few volumes, but each one a 
monument of engineering. My first books, if I remember cor- 
rectly, were bought of J. S. & C. Adams, in Amherst, Mass. I 
used to go in there and look wistfully at their shelves. My al- 
lowance of money was very small — scarcely more than enough 
to pay my postage, when a letter cost twelve and a half or twen- 
ty-five cents. To take a two or three-dollar book from my five 
dollars of spending-money would have left me in a state of sad 
impecuniosity. Therefore, for many, many months I took it out 
in looking. 

" As early as at sixteen years of age I had begun to speak a 
little in public — faint peepings, just such as I hear in young 
birds before they are fully fledged. For such service the only 
payment was a kind patience till I relieved them by finishing my 
crude efforts. But at that time — say 1832 — I was sent by the 
college society as delegate to a temperance convention in Pel- 
ham, or Enfield, or somewhere else. I conceived a desire there- 
after to give a temperance lecture. I have forgotten how I ever 
got a chance to do it. But I remember that there came an invi- 
tation from Brattleboro', Vt, to lecture on the 4th of July. 
My expenses were to be paid ! A modest pride warmed my 
heart at the thought of making a real speech in public. I smoth- 
ered all the fears and diffidences with the resolute purpose 
that I would succeed ! I remember the days of writing and 
anxious preparation, and the grand sense of being a man when 
I had finished my manuscript ! But the most generous purposes 
are apt to be ruined with selfishness ; and my public spirit, alas ! 
had a financial streak of joy in it — my expenses were to be paid ! 

" Well, suppose I chose to walk and save all the expenses ? 
I should have at least eight dollars of my own, of which I need 
give no account ! That would be an era indeed. But grave 



132 BIOGRAPHY OF 

scruples arose. Was it honest to take money for expenses which 
I had not really incurred ? If I went by stage I might lawfully 
charge my fare and food ; but if neither of them cost me any- 
thing, how could I honestly make a bill of expenses ? I did 
not get any relief in reflecting upon it. I started off on foot, 
went up the Connecticut River valley, and reached Brattleboro' 
by way of Greenfield. 

" Every hour this question of honesty returned. My feet 
blistered with walking, but I stamped on them hard in the morn- 
ing, and the momentary exquisite pain seemed to paralyze the 
sensibility afterwards. Whether it was \he counter irritation 
that relieved my brain, or whether — as I fear that I did — I smoth- 
ered conscience by saying to myself that I would settle the mat- 
ter when the time came, I do not know. But I was relieved from 
even that struggle, inasmuch as not a word was said to me about 
expenses, or money in any form. Yet I had a charming visit. 
The rising of the moon from behind the mountain that hedges 
in the town on the east powerfully excited my imagination, and 
led to the writing of the first piece, I believe, that I ever printed. 
It was published in the Guest, a college paper, issued chiefly 
as a rival to another college paper whose name (alas!) has escap- 
ed me. And if anybody could send me a volume of that Guest I 
should be exceedingly beholden to him ! 

" But after reaching college again — no longer a mere stu- 
dent, but a public man, one who had made speeches, one who 
determined to be modest and not to allow success to puff 
him up — a very great and wonderful thing happened : the post 
brought me a letter from Brattleboro' containing ten dollars. I 
could not believe my eyes. I forgot my scruples. Providence 
had put it to me in such a way that I got my conscience over on 
the other side, and felt that it would be a sin and shame for me 
to be raising questions and scruples on such a matter ! But O 
that bill ! How it warmed me and invigorated me ! I looked 
at it before going to sleep ; I examined my pocket the next 
morning early, to be sure that I had not dreamed it. How 1 
pitied the poor students, who had not, I well knew, ten dollars 
in their pockets. Still, I tried to keep down pride in its offensive 
forms. I would not be lifted up. 1 would strive to be even more 
familiar than before with the plainest of my acquaintances. 
'What is money?' said I to myself. 'It is not property that 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 1 33 

makes the man ; it is — ' Well, perhaps I thought it was the 
ability to deliver eloquent temperance addresses. But great is 
the deceitfulness of money. I felt the pride of riches. I knew 
every waking moment that I had money. I was getting purse- 
proud. 

" I resolved to invest. There was but one thing to invest in 
— books. I went to Adams's store ; I saw an edition of Burke's 
works. With the ease and air of a rich man I bought and paid 
for them. Adams looked at me, and then at the bill, and then 
at me. I never could make up my mind whether it was admira- 
tion or suspicion that his face expressed. But I wanted him, 
and panted to have him ask me, ' Where did you get all of this 
ten-dollar bill ? ' 

" However, I concluded that the expression was one of genu- 
ine admiration. With my books under my arm (I never to this 
day could get over the disposition to carry home my own pack- 
ages) I returned to college, and placed on my table my volumes 
of Burke ! I tried to hide from myself that I had a vain pur- 
pose in it, that I was waiting to see Bannister's surprises and to 
hear Howard's exclamation, and to have it whispered in the 
class-room: ' I say ! have you heard that Beecher has got a splen- 
did copy of Burke ? ' 

" After this I was a man that owned a library ! I became 
conservative and frugal. Before, I had spent at least a dollar 
and a half a year for knickknacks ; but after I had founded a 
library I reformed all such wastes, and every penny I could 
raise or save I compelled to transform itself into books ! 

" As I look back on the influence of this struggle for books 
I cannot deny that it has been salutary. I do not believe that I 
spent ten dollars in all my college course for horses or amuse- 
ments of any kind. But at my graduation I owned about fifty 
volumes. The getting of these volumes was not the least im- 
portant element of my college education. There are two 
kinds of property which tend to moralize life. What they are I 
will tell you some ot\er time, if you will coax me." 

His reading, as we have said, was very largely of the old 
English writers, whom he studied until the flavor of their lan- 
guage had been so thoroughly appropriated that it is very plain- 
ly discernible in all his early public writings. An old poet, 
Daniel, who belonged to the times of Spenser and Shakspere, 



1 34 BIOGRAPHY OF 

was a great favorite of his. In a sermon preached in 1862 he 
quotes the poem that especially pleased him. We quote it entire 
with his introduction, and venture to say that the mind that 
makes choice of such a poem is sound and healthy at the core : 
" I remembered a poem that I had read in my youth, and 
that I used to hang over with great interest. It had a strange 
fascination for me then. The writer was born in 1562, and he 
wrote it somewhere between that time and 1600. It has had a 
good long swing, and it will go rolling down a great many years 
yet: 

" ' He that of such a height hath built his mind, 

And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong, 

As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame 

Of his resolved powers, nor all the wind 

Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong 

His settled peace or to disturb the same — 

What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may 

The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey ? 

" \ And with how free an eye doth he look down 
Upon these lower regions of turmoil ! 
Where all the storms of passions mainly beat 
On flesh and blood ; where honor, power, renown 
Are only gay afflictions, golden toil ; 
Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet 
As frailty doth, and only great doth seem 
To little minds, who do it so esteem. 

" ' He looks upon the mightiest monarch's wars 
But only as on stately robberies ; 
Where evermore the fortune that prevails 
Must be the right ; the ill-succeeding mars 
The fairest and the best-fac'd enterprise. 
Great pirate Pompey lesser pirates quails: 
Justice, he sees (as if seduced), still 
Conspires with power, whose cause must not be ill. 

" ' He sees the face of right as manifold 
As are the passions of uncertain man, 
Who puts it in all colors, all attires, 
To serve his ends and make his courses hold. 
He sees that, let deceit work what it can, 
Plot and contrive base ways to high desires, 
That the all-guiding Providence doth yet 
All disappoint, and mocks the smoke of wit. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 135 

" ' Nor is he moved with all the thunder-cracks 
Of tyrants' threats, or with the surly brow 
Of Pow'r, that proudly sits on others' crimes, 
Charg'd with more crying sins than those he checks. 
The storms of sad confusion that may grow 
Up in the present for the coming times, 
Appall not him, that hath no side at all 
But of himself, and knows the worst can fall. 

'* 'Although his heart (so near allied to earth) 
Cannot but pity the perplexed state 
Of troublous and distressed mortality, 
That thus make way unto the ugly birth 
Of their own sorrows, and do still beget 
Affliction upon imbecility : 

Yet, seeing thus the course of things must run, 
He looks thereon not strange, but as foredone. 

'"And whilst distraught ambition compasses, 
And is encompassed ; whilst as craft deceives, 
And is deceived : whilst man doth ransack man, 
And builds on blood, and rises by distress, 
And th' inheritance of desolation leaves 
To great-expecting hopes : he looks thereon 
As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye, 
And bears no venture in impiety.'" 

Such is the record of Henry Ward Beecher in college. It is 
one of which none need be ashamed. It may be pondered 
with advantage and followed with profit by every one standing 
himself upon the threshold of that eventful period in his own 
life. It is the record of a man who was loyal to duty, to truth 
and purity. Independent in his line of thought and study, yet 
obedient to the government of the college, industrious and as- 
piring, his course was essentially a period of education, a drawing 
out of his powers, a training-school of his whole nature, a fitting 
preparation for that high place which he came ultimately to fill 
in the confidence and affection of the nation and the world, 






CHAPTER VIII. 

Lane Seminary — Dr. Beecher Called — Home at Walnut Hills— Amusing 
Incidents — Family Meeting — Death of Mrs. Beecher — Extracts from 
Journal — First Mention of Preaching in the West — Experience in Ec- 
clesiastical Matters — Despondency — Meeting of Synod — Influences of 
the Times — Revulsion — A Rift along the Horizon — " Full iolly Knight." 

AT the close of his college course, after a two-days' visit to 
Sutton with Miss Bullard, he started for Cincinnati to begin 
his theological studies at Lane Seminary, of which insti- 
tution his father had been elected president and professor of 
theology, and whither he had moved with his family two years 
before. The Seminary, located at Walnut Hills, two miles out of 
the city, had been established for the sake of supplying preachers 
and pastors for the great and growing West. It was thought that 
the territory traversed by the Ohio and the Mississippi was " the 
valley of decision" for the great interests of our country and of 
the world. To meet the emergency and take possession of this 
broad domain for Christ, its rightful Lord, was felt to be the 
most important work that could occupy the attention of the 
Christian public. It had been decided that a theological semi- 
nary established at Cincinnati, in the very centre of this district, 
afforded the most effective means for attaining the great object 
in view ; that the best man in the whole country should be se- 
cured to stand at its head ; and that that man, all things consid- 
ered, was Dr. Beecher. He would bring energy, enthusiasm, and 
practical wisdom ; would secure confidence in the work among 
Eastern capitalists, and conduct the enterprise to assured success. 
Out of this conviction sprang the Seminary and the call to 
Dr. Beecher to be its head. He was in perfect and enthusiastic 
sympathy with the object in view. He says of the project : 
" There was not on earth a place but that I would have opened 
my ears to for a moment. . . . But I had felt and thought and 
labored a great deal about raising up ministers, and the idea 
that I might be called to teach the best mode of preaching to 

the young ministry of the broad West flashed through my mind 

136 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. I 37 

like lightning. It was the greatest thought that ever entered my 
soul ; it filled it, and displaced everything else." 

Coming to this definite work under the inspiration of this 
great thought, from a church which had been for years in the 
midst of a continuous revival, he had naturally given the Semi- 
nary a markedly practical tone of spiritual earnestness. A 
strong man himself, he attracted men of like stamp ; and there 
had come, soon after he took charge of the institution, " a noble 
class of young men, uncommonly strong, a little uncivilized, en- 
tirely radical, and terribly in earnest." 

Dr. Beecher's method of instruction was peculiar and in har- 
mony with his spirit and purpose. It was not so much of the 
formal lecture order as of the free conversational kind, in which 
questions were invited, objections were answered, thought was 
quickened, and feeling was awakened, with the result that the 
great truth which was the subject of the lecture was likely to be 
not only in a large measure comprehended but felt and appro- 
priated by the students. 

One of the professors, Calvin E. Stowe, for whom Henry 
Ward conceived one of those ardent friendships which distin- 
guished him through life, helped him in the same direction. 
" He led him to an examination of the Bible and to an analysis 
of its several portions, not as the parts of a machine, formal and 
dead, but as of a body of truth instinct with God, warm with all 
divine and human sympathies, clothed with language adapted t& 
their fit expression and to be understood as similar language 
used for similar ends in every-day life." And we have now in 
our hands a roll of manuscript in which, in line with this idea, 
the young student wrote out during his theological course a care- 
ful analysis of the miracles and parables of the New Testa- 
ment. 

Without doubt this tone of the institution and method of in- 
struction had an important and very beneficial influence upon 
him at this formative period of his professional life, giving him a 
genuine enthusiasm for his work, and training him to investi- 
gate carefully and analyze clearly the truths brought under ex- 
amination. 

And, that there might be lacking no element for his fittest 
training for the great work that was before him, the question of 
slavery had arisen among the students, creating such a disturb. 






I38 BIOGRAPHY OF 

ance that forty, under the leadership of Theodore Weld, had 
withdrawn just before he appeared on the ground. 

Of the place, his coming, and some of the incidents in his 
life his brother, Rev. T. K. Beecher, says : 

"By and by they two, Henry and Charles, came to study 
theology in Lane Seminary, a brick building in the woods of 
Ohio. The whistle of the quail, the scolding squirrels, once the 
heavy, busky flight of wild turkeys — my hero killed one and 
claimed a second — the soft thump and pat of a rabbit, the breezy 
rush of wild pigeons, were here heard. 

" A foot-path led through the woods, over which came three 
times a day the heroes, shouting, exploding the vowel sounds, 
and imitating cows, frogs, and crows — a laughing menagerie. 

" The Academy of Music, two miles off down-town — Henry 
primo-basso, Charles violin and tenor ; and the little boy, at last 
an alto, permitted to run between the heroes and sing, while eyes 
feasted on Charles's violin bow-hand, and ears were filled with 
Henry's basso, are well remembered. 

" The ' Creation ' and ' Hallelujah Chorus ' were our winter's 
work, and Henry was off sometimes lecturing on temperance and 
phrenology. Sometimes on a Saturday morning, at family prayer, 
there were Catharine, George, Henry, Harriet, Isabella, Tom and 
Jim, Aunt Esther, and father still praying ' Overturn and over- 
turn,' and singing by all hands : 

" ' Awake and sing the song 

Of Moses and the Lamb ; 
Wake, every heart and every tongue, 

To praise the Saviour's name. 
Sing on your heavenly way, 

Ye ransomed sinners, sing ! 
Sing on rejoicing every day 

In Christ the Heavenly King.' 

Long, long discussions, lasting till past midnight and resumed 
at every meal, of ' free agency,' i sovereignty,' ' natural and moral 
ability,' interpretations, and such. 

" Charles could whittle graceful boats with sharp knife out 
of thick sticks. 

" Henry had the full set of Walter Scott's works. 

" Charles took lessons on the violin of Tosso, in the city. 
Henry wrote something that Editor Charles Hammond printed 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. I 39 

in the Cincinnati Gazette. O wonderful Henry ! They both 
wrote long, long letters to two far-away beings, and the little boy 
sometimes took them to the post-office and paid twenty-five cents, 
wondering what they could find to write such long, long letters 
about." 

His brother Charles says : 

' The glorious old forest lay between the Seminary and father's 
house, and we made it ring with vocal practice and musical scales 
and imitations of band-music. The house father occupied was of 
brick, and Henry whitewashed it with a kind of whitewash that 
was equal to paint, of a sort of cream color. I can see him now, 
on his tall ladder, with his spattered overalls, working away. 

" One of our professors was B , a nice, dapper, rosy little 

man, in the chair of history. We naughty boys made fun of 
him. Henry took notes. I would give something handsome for 
that note-book. B was fond of quoting authors with sound- 
ing names, Bochart among others, and Henry would have it ' Go- 
cart,' and made a hieroglyphic to that effect. 

" We walked to and from the city, up and down the long hill, 
and attended father's church, Second Presbyterian, on Fourth 
Street. Henry had a Bible-class of young ladies, for which he 
made preparation by writing." 

For three years young Beecher was again a member of the 
home-circle, from which he had been so long separated. This 
home had apparently lost none of that broad, open-doored hospi- 
tality and cheerful spirit that so markedly characterized it in 
Litchfield. " The house was full. There was a constant high 
tide of life and animation. The old carry-all was perpetually 
vibrating between home and the city, and the excitement of com- 
ing and going rendered anything like stagnation an impossi- 
bility." "It was an exuberant and glorious life while it lasted. 
The atmosphere of the household was replete with mental oxy- 
gen, full charged with intellectual electricity. Nowhere else have 
we felt anything resembling or equalling it. It was a kind of 
moral heaven, the purity, vivacity, inspiration, and enthusiasm of 
which only those can appreciate who have lost it and feel that in 
this world there is, there can be, no place like home." 

Of two of its members and some of their make-shifts we have 
this account, copied from his journal : 

" The Econo7nical Family. — My father was an excellent man 



I40 BIOGRAPHY OF 

(for no one provided better dinners — soups, codfish, mutton- 
chops ; even, upon great days, he has been known to have a 
turkey). He was a man of enlarged mind and great sagacity. 
He was before his age in his views, and always before his salary 
in his expenses. This was from no want of calculation : no- 
body ever was longer and shrewder in that. But he was aspiring, 
and by nature seemed to go beyond things seen, far into the 
region of things hoped for. 

" His sister, an antique maiden lady, differed vastly from him 
and could in no sense be called enlightened. It was astonishing 
to see how his example and his reasoning were thrown away upon 
her. To the last she clung to those earthly, low notions which 
seem so peculiar to this world. She would persist in saying 
that no one should buy what he could not pay for, nor pay for 
any new thing until old debts were settled. Nor could she be 
brought to adopt an enlarged policy in respect to the family. 
We were obliged to wear clothes until they were worn out — at 
least out at the knees and elbows — altho' the fashion should 
change a dozen times during that period. So that it was not un- 
common to find one's self two or three times the pink of fashion 
before a suit was fairly condemned as unseaworthy. In fact, we 
may be said always to have set the fashion at such times, since 
we were seen wearing the proper cut before even the leading 
beau. But if this was comfortable it was but little amends for 
the days of darkness which ensued. One day we revelled (?) in 
our glory ; the next every one gaped at our uncouth fashion. 
We might properly be likened to a ship riding gracefully upon 
the water, but suddenly left by the tide sticking in the mud, stiff 
and immovable. I used to comfort myself, when laughed at, by 
saying, ' Never mind ; you laugh now, before six months you'll be 
imitating me.' And so it often proved, till I began to think I 
was a prophet. 

" But it is of the family I write and not of myself, for be it 
known that I am not under vassalage. I am free from both au- 
thority and — money : the latter condition as no reproach. I 
have often noticed that these two kinds of independence are 
closely allied. True independence seems always in the lurch." 

One amusing incident that grew out of the half country- 
farm life which they then lived he used often to refer to. 

Living in the outskirts of the city, where the fences were 



REV. HEXRY WARD BEECHER. 141 

poor and straying cattle often gave them great annoyance, Henry 
one day, to his immense disgust, found a cow quietly resting in 
the middle of the barn floor. With the accumulated indigna- 
tion aroused, by numerous chases, which these poachers of the 
highway had led him, by many tramplings across flower-beds 
and destruction of the garden vegetables, he drove her out and 
chased her down the street. Coming in hot and tired from his 
run, he threw himself upon the sofa, saying : " There, I guess I 
have taught one old cow to know where she belongs ! " " What 
do you mean?" said the doctor, looking up apprehensively from 
his paper. " Why, I found another cow in the barn, and I have 
turned her out and chased her clear down the street, and I think 
she will stay away now." "Well," said Dr. Beecher, "you have 
done it. I have just bought that cow, and had to wade the 
Ohio River twice to get her home, and after I have got her safely 
into the barn you have turned her out. You have done it, and 
no mistake." And the chasing of that cow was renewed. 

His humor bubbled out at all times and in all places, finding 
its occasion even in so staid a matter as chapel prayers. He 
roomed with Prof. Stowe, who was the soul of punctuality, and 
was continually pained at the failure of his young room-mate to 
be on time at morning prayers in the Seminary chapel. 

Having done his best to wake him up one morning, apparent- 
ly without success, he had gone down-stairs with many expres- 
sions of disgust. No sooner was he out of the room than Henry 
sprang up, dressed himself as only college students can, ran to 
the Seminary by a back way, and when the professor entered was 
sitting demurely in front of the desk. The amazement of the 
teacher at this unexpected appearance, rubbing his glasses and 
peering at him again and again to determine whether it was real 
or he only saw a vision, war, always remembered by Mr. Beecher 
with a chuckle of merriment. 

For a short time near the close of his theological course 
he edited a paper, and appears to have done his work with 
marked success; but circumstances brought it to a speedy close. 
" The Cincinnati Journal needed an editor. There was at that 
time in the middle class of Lane Seminary a green young man 
of some facility of pen. He had written a series of anonymous 
articles on the Catholic question in the evening paper edited 
by Mr. Thomas. He was considered rather tonguey, and not 



14-2 BIOGRAPHY OF 

likely to back down from anything from want of hopefulness and 
self-confidence. Him Dr. Brainerd called to the chair, and, on 
relinquishing the editorship, recommended this beardless youth 
to the proprietors of the journal as his successor. One fine 
morning this young man found himself an editor upon a salary ! 
An editor must have a coat ; and Piatt Evans made a lion-skin 
overcoat that has never had a successor or an equal. He must 
have a watch ! A plain, white-faced watch soon ticked in his 
pocket. Alas ! evil days befell the publishers. The paper had 
a new owner. He did not want the young editor; the young 
editor did want the watch, but could not pay for it ; the seller 
took it back, to the great grief of the young theologian, who went 
back disconsolate to his classes at Lane Seminary, and was 
broken-hearted for a whole day. The young man recovered, and 
has been in mischief ever since, some folks think." 

When the pro-slavery riots broke out in Cincinnati in 1836, 
and James G. Birney's printing-office and press were destroyed 
by a mob headed by Kentucky slaveholders, young Beecher vol- 
unteered and was sworn in as special constable, and for several 
nights patrolled the streets thoroughly armed to protect the ne- 
groes and their friends. He was earnest in this matter, as in 
everything else that he undertook. His sister Harriet, finding 
him busy running bullets, and asking him what he was doing it 
for, was a good deal startled to hear him answer in a hard, deter- 
mined voice : " To kill men." 

Besides the influence of this common, every-day life, which 
was afterwards reflected in his own hospitable spirit and home, 
two domestic events took place during these three years that de- 
serve more especial notice. The first was " the Family Meet- 
ing." 

" Long before Edward came out here the doctor had tried to 
have a family meeting, but did not succeed. The children were 
too scattered. Two were in Connecticut, some in Massachusetts, 
and one in Rhode Island. But now — just think of it ! — there has 
been a family meeting in Ohio ! When Edward returned he 
brought on Mary from Hartford. William came down from Put- 
nam, George from Batavia, Ohio ; Catharine and Harriet were 
here already ; Henry and Charles at home, too, besides Isabella, 
Thomas, and James. These eleven ! The first time they all 
ever met together ! Mary had never seen James, and she had 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 1 43 

seen Thomas but once. Such a time as they had ! The old 
doctor was almost transported with joy. The affair had been 
under negotiation for some time. He returned home from Day- 
ton late one Saturday evening. The next morning they for the 
first time assembled in the parlor. There were more tears than 
words. The doctor attempted to pray, but could scarcely speak. 
His full heart poured itself out in a flood of weeping. He could 
not go on. Edward continued, and each one in his turn uttered 
some sentence of thanksgiving. They then began at the head 
and related their fortunes. After special prayer all joined hands 
and sang ' Old Hundred ' in these words : 

" 'From all that dwell below the skies 
Let the Creator's praise arise.' 



"When left alone in the evening they had a general examina- 
tion of all their characters. The shafts of wit flew amain, the 
doctor being struck in several places. He w r as, however, expert 
enough to hit most of them in return. From the uproar of the 
general battle all must have been wounded. . . . 

" Tuesday morning saw them together again, drawn up in a 
straight line for the inspection of the king of happy men. After 
receiving particular instructions they formed into a circle. The 
doctor made a long and affecting speech. He felt that he stood 
for the last time in the midst of all his children, and each word 
fell with the weight of a patriarch's. He embraced them once 
more in all the tenderness of his big heart. Each took of all a 
farewell kiss. With joined hands they united in a hymn. A 
prayer was offered, and finally the parting blessing was spoken." 

The other event referred to was the death of Mrs. Beecher, 
which occurred at the close of Henry's first Seminary year. She 
was his step-mother, but " she did all that she could for my 
good." 

" In the holy yearnings of this truly devoted mother the 
whole family was included ; nor could the older children perceive 
any less fervency in her desires for their true welfare than for 
that of her own flesh and blood." And it was with deep and true 
feeling that he writes " that God was with her in her closing days, 
and that the light of his countenance cheered her passage to the 
tomb." 



144 BIOdRAPHY OF 

These varied experiences of joy and sorrow in the home-life 
of this period ; this variety of occupation — now studying and at- 
tending lectures in the Seminary, lecturing on temperance and 
phrenology, drilling in the " Hallelujah Chorus," painting the old 
family mansion, accompanying his father in his attendance up- 
on presbytery and synod, now a constable and anon an editor — 
all contributed to give him a broad culture, had much to do with 
the variety of labor which he undertook in after-life, and fitted 
him for that easy, natural, and familiar mingling with all kinds 
and conditions of men which was in him so marked a character- 
istic. 

Of what he did, read, and thought at this time we are fortu- 
nate in having another source of authentic information from his 
own pen. Upon the unruled blank leaf of a letter-book, as large 
as a commercial ledger and heavily bound in leather, is written in 
a large hand, large enough to cover the whole page : 

JOURNAL 

OF 

EVENTS, FEELINGS, THOUGHTS, PLANS, ETC, 

JUST AS THEY HAVE MET ME, THUS GIVING IN PART 

A TRANSCRIPT OF MY INNER AND OUTER LIFE. 

BEGUN JUNE, 1835, AT LANE THEOL. SEMINARY. 

On the first page, " Begun three days after birthday," June 
27. " I have tried times without number to keep a diary or 
a journal of my religious feelings. I have never succeeded." 
1. " I am not enough contemplative to make a record of re- 
flections and feelings very definite." 2. " I never could be sin- 
cere. The only use which I distinctly know that I have derived 
from it is a knowledge of my being very averse to saying just 
what my feelings were. I could not help feeling : ' This will, 
perhaps, be seen.'" And why should I not so feel ? One object 
in keeping a journal is to look back upon your mind as it reflect- 
ed itself at different periods past, and if you keep one no one can 
pretend to have enough of prospective wisdom to save it from 
the hands of others." 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 1 45 

After half a page of reasons why this possibility — which has 
indeed been realized — may take place, he says : "Can I conceal 
it all from myself, and feign to myself that that which I am dis- 
closing and giving form and permanence to, my most secret feel- 
ings, none will see ? And when I feel secretly that they will be 
seen, is it possible to go through honestly a narration of those 
emotions from, the disclosure of which I shrink in my inmost 
soul ? " 

In view of this possibility, he decides upon a modification of 
his ideal : 

" In this journal I do not set before me as an object to tell 
all my feelings, but only such as for any reason I may choose to 
tell. I intend to record, too, my opinions and reflections on oc- 
currences, on persons, on books, and to find a resting-place, if 
possible, for many of those daily thoughts which are too short and 
unconnected to be noted down separately, and yet of some small 
value, perhaps — at least to give variety to a journal. Then, too, 
being little tenacious of dates, I here mean to record and date 
all changes in my life, that afterwards, when business and multi- 
plicity of other facts have crowded from my mind such facts, I 
may here recur as to a faithful chronicle and refresh my memory. 

" Here, then, I mean to be at ease, and not molest myself with 
any obligations to write so much, or so often, or so anything, but 
in mental dishabille I will stroll through my mind and do as I 
choose." 

It can well be supposed that with such an introduction facing 
us we feel some delicacy, even with the quasi permission which 
his departure from the true ideal of a journal gives, in handling, 
and especially in giving to the public, the matters which are here 
written. While we find no word that a perfectly upright and 
honorable man need be ashamed of, we do find private matters 
which we have no right to make public. Out of the great 
amount of material which the journal affords we have selected 
such portions as illustrate the salient features of his life, char- 
acter, work, and methods at this time. 

First of all, we find him still keeping up the old habit of read- 
ing, and after a very critical method. 

"July 1, 1835. — I finished Scott's ' Antiquary' this morning, 
and I propose giving some little account of my impressions. To 
do it I shall be obliged to collect my general scattered feelings 



I46 BIOGRAPHY OF 

into a definite, tangible form ; and if I always did it after reading 
I should have more numerous ideas of things and of their forms, 
and more correct ones. 

" I think it one of Scott's best, although my personal taste 
gives his novels founded on warlike customs, as 'Ivanhoe,' more 
relish. But that does not alter the abstract merits of this, for 
there are grounds of judging a work altogether aside from our 
taste as to the subject judged. There are but two general con- 
siderations in estimating a novel. First, has the author been a 
faithful copyist of nature, even when his effort is of the imagina- 
tion ? And, second, has he made a judicious selection and skil- 
ful combination of his material." 

After several pages of the large ledger have been devoted to 
this subject, there follows this entry : 

"July 4- — The difference between Scott and Shakspere is of 
two kinds : (1) the difference of dramatic and prosaic descrip- 
tion, and (2) the native difference of the two men. The first 
involves a discussion and comparison of the two kinds of 
writing. The dramatic is narrower, more formal and measured, 
and consequently more stiff. No one ever heard one speak 
as Macbeth, as Hamlet, or as Iago, for no one ever spoke so. 
Passion, or indeed nature, never marches in heroic measure. In 
another respect it differs. There is a general sameness of lan- 
guage. The imitation of nature respects feelings and charac- 
ter, and not expression, if we except some comic characters. But 
prose imitates with perfect freedom, unshackled by verse, not only 
the passion, character, etc., but the expression and language. 

" In this respect Scott differs from himself as a poet and nov- 
elist as much as when a novelist he differs from Shakspere, 
etc. ..." 

Similar and lengthy criticisms of Crabbe, Coleridge, Byron, 
Burns, and others follow, many of them crude, but all aiming to 
grasp and express the original thought of the poet, as he says 
after naming some rules by which to judge a book : 

"But such things are the externals of criticism. I admire 
the German way of" going into the motive and spirit of a poem, 
and discussing the principles and source of feeling." 

We find his habit of drawing from his own experiences some 
moral or spiritual lesson, and then teaching it to others, thus early 
formed : 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 1 47 

" June 27, 1835. — . . . Being unwell is by no means useless. 
It crowds one on to thoughts of death, and sweeps away all the 
mist of forgetfulness which the frivolity of events has accumu- 
lated. One must either wrap himself in designed forgetfulness — 
which is a stupid resource — or come to some conclusion in re- 
spect to his religious prospects. For my part, in sickness (what 
little I have had) I am not agitated, but rendered serious and 
calmly apprehensive, and I begin to think what God is, and 
Christ, and heavenly joy, and compare them with my tastes and 
disposition, and see if they accord or are repulsive. I've written 
enough for the present, so I'll return to Scott's ' Legend of Mont- 
rose.' " 

We find very little, almost nothing, concerning the regulation 
work and studies of the theological course, possibly because 
some other book which has not come down to us contained 
these. He seems to have plenty to do, and carries into his work 
a very decided determination to succeed. 

"Aug. 2, 1835, Su?iday. — I have for this time work enough : 
two courses of lectures — one, for my Bible-class, to begin next 
Sunday ; the other a course of temperance lectures for Reading 
and elsewhere. I don't know how I shall succeed, but I am 
never self-distrustful and often feel sure I shall do very well, and 
as often see that I may fall through entirely. Either course fail- 
ing would mortify me. But here, as elsewhere, let me start with 
feeling, 'I will persevere, and with every endeavor which interest 
and ingenuity can furnish.' Such being one's constant feeling 
and action, hardly anything is invincible. Perseverance without 
corresponding exercise of all one's mind is but a dogged spin- 
ning out of tedious and useless effort. Re7nember when most dis- 
couraged to labor as though you were in the full blossom of Ifofie, 
and shortly you will be." 

At this time he was singing in, and sometimes leading, the 
choir in his father's church, as he writes : 

" Nov. 14. — The medical authorities of the family, having or- 
dered me up for inspection, have decided that I was not sea- 
worthy, but have, in view of past services, ordered me into 
dock to be a receiving-ship, and there to undergo thorough re- 
pairs. I am quietly riding in the dock without mast or rigging. 
They have sent aboard two sets of workmen this morning, under 
the care of Messrs. Calomel and Aloes ; and these are to remove 



148 BIOGRAPHY OF 

all my cargo, ballast, etc., after which I am to be new-rigged and 
furnished and sent out on a new cruise. This is well. I have 
sailed very dully for some time and came near to foundering once 
or twice. 

" Will you take my place to-day and sing bass ? I know of no 
one possessing suitable gravity except yourself to confront the 
audience and do justice to music. . . . Yours truly, 

" 'Old Constitution: " 

A line of tender sentiment runs through the journal, appear- 
ing whenever any reference is made to the one to whom he was 
engaged. Concerning so delicate a matter we only give extracts 
sufficient to show the radiant atmosphere in which, at least at 
times, he walked, and the deep and sincere affection which he 
cherished. They are to be read as the opening stanzas of that 
beautiful idyl that closed only with his life. 

"Aug. 4, 1835. — It is a little curious, perhaps not, however, 
that I very much dislike to say anything in my journal of my 
thoughts and feeling for E., who is so much of my existence. 
Well, I suppose the more and the more delicately we love the 
less we care and wish to say about it. It becomes a matter of 
heart, not of tongue ; it becomes & feeling, and feeling has no lan- 
guage except action. I have sent her a large letter, largely laden 
with affection. . . ." 

"Aug. 5, 1835. — Woke up and thought of E , M , 

and G ; compared their characters. M is marked by 

intellect, G by lady-like character, sweetness, and gay- 

ness. E has neither so prominent, but both well combined 

and softened by strongest and sweetest affectionateness. Her 
character is uniform, and projects, if anywhere, in line of affec- 
tion." 

" Sept. 14, 1835. — I wonder what people think of my warmth ? 
Some, I know, estimate it far too highly, because they have not 
seen much of such things. Others, and most, suppose it very low 
and suspect very little of it. It is in truth but medium naturally. 

Well, in a year or two, and then E will be disappointed the 

right way. What a noble creature E is ! I could have 

looked through ten thousand and never have found one so every 
way suited to me. How dearly do I love her ! I long for the 
portrait." 

" Oct. 1, 1835. — Found a packet of letters from my dearest 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 149 

E . Oh, how dear ! Her likeness too, which, though imper- 
fect in some respects, has very much the looks of the original, 
and if only otie feature were preserved I would feel grateful. 
But, excepting the mouth, each feature is faithfully like her own. 
I shall begin a letter to her to-night. God bless and keep her ! 
I love her more and more and say less and less about it. 

" Harriet has had E 's portrait all day, and I have felt 

quite lonesome without it. Last evening I retired to bed and 
very philosophically decided to leave the portrait in my side- 
pocket. I lay for some half-hour and was quite convinced that 
it was in the wrong place, and removed it to my pillow. It soon 
underwent another migration — where, one may imagine if he will 
recall all such doings as depicted in novels." 

The following is his first mention of preaching in the West : 

"Aug. 9, Sunday, 1835. — Preached twice in George's church. 
In morning with great dryness and trouble, and felt much morti- 
fied — more, I think, than grieved. 

" Afternoon smaller audience, but had great liberty and flu- 
ency, and produced effect ; but whether superficial or perma- 
nent and saving, God only knows. Afternoon text : ' My ways 
not as your ways' ; Morning: 'For we thus judge' (2 Cor. v. 
14, etc.) 

" After preliminaries, subject, * The genius of Christianity is 
not to produce gloom or debar from pleasure ; but, contrary, 
earthly pleasures can only be enjoyed by Christians, and much 
more heavenly.' " 

He begins to be conscious of unused powers. 

" Sept., 1835. — Since reading Crabbe and Scott I am possessed 
with the notion of writing characters. I have some models which 
I know would be originals." 

His love of fun evidently subjected him now and then to 
criticism. To one whose remarks had touched him to the quick 
he writes in self-defence : 

" Oct. 29 [1835]. — • • • You said last night that I was never 
made for a minister. If a minister were made to wear a lachry- 
mose face and never to enjoy or make mirth, you said truly and 
I was not born to it. There are, in fact, three classes of divines 
— the ascetic, the neuter, and the sunshiny ; the first conceive the 
chief end of man to consist in a long face, upturned eyes, a pro- 
found sanctimonious look. ... I must plead guilty if you mean 



I 50 BIOGRAPHY OF 

that I was not born to the rank of these worthy personages. Far 
be it from me to believe that religion makes ridiculous dunces. 
And though I think many such are truly pious men, yet such en- 
dowments are the deformity and misfortune, not the ornament, 
of their piety. The second class I call neuter because they (like 
the Chinese leaf by which character is told) quirl and roll just 
according to the party with which they are. ... I must confess 
I have too many opinions of my own to be whirled about by every 
change of company. And though it is proper and decent that 
one should conform to the nature of different occasions, so as not 
to jest at a funeral, laugh at church, or dance in a hospital among 
the sick, the dead and dying ; and though one should respect the 
conditions of his company, so as not to obtrude upon age the 
buoyancy of youth, . . . yet I am sure neither old age nor old 
reflections . . . shall make me disown mirth. . . . Now for the 
third class, the glorious, sunshiny ones. I envy them, I emulate 
them. These are they who think there is a time for relaxation 
and elegant enjoyment. Too much is to be done to allow them 
long seasons of gayety. . . . But while they labor hard, think and 
write, and preach and visit, weeping with those who weep, they 
conceive by the same authority that they may unbend and re- 
fresh the mind by laughing with those who laugh. . . . To be 
mirthful is part of our constitution, and I believe God never gave 
us that which it is a sin to exercise. . . . None but those who 
feel it can tell how hard it is to restrain a disposition which sees 
everything in the most ludicrous point of view. But God knows 
that if I have a good deal of mirth I compensate for it in secret ; 
and although now I look for different times, yet till now I have 
had enough of anything but joy to make mirth acceptable to me. 
You said what you did in jest, but I lay awake all night think- 
ing of it. God will bear me witness that I love the ministry, and 
if. it be necessary for me to lay aside even my constitutional 
gayety that I may be more useful, I will cheerfully do it. . . ." 

From a " catalogue of books in my possession " we learn that 
on December 2, 1835, he had 42 volumes of theological works, 71 
volumes of literary, 10 scientific, and 12 miscellaneous, making a 
grand total in all of 135 volumes — not a bad showing for one 
who had earned every book, either by labor or severe economy, 
and, what is more to the point, had read and studied them all. 

We must now turn from the perusal of his journal to note 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 1 5 I 

other influences than those already referred to — those of the Semi- 
nary, of home and books — that were at work upon him at this time. 
There were some that had a very important influence in shaping 
his ecclesiastical bearing through life. 

These were days of heresy-hunting ; days when Albert Barnes 
was arraigned before presbytery for unsoundness because of 
some kind of heterodoxy (?) discovered in his notes upon Romans, 
and when the conflict between the two parties in the Presbyte- 
rian Church was rapidly advancing to a division of that great 
body into Old and New School. "Dr. Beecher," so writes Mrs. 
Stowe, " was now the central point of a great theological battle. 
It was a sort of spiritual Armageddon, being the confluence of 
the forces of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Calvinistic fatalism, 
meeting in battle with the advancing rationalism of New England 
New School theology. On one side was hard, literal interpreta- 
tion of Bible declarations and the Presbyterian standards assert- 
ing man's utter and absolute natural and moral inability to obey 
God's commands, and on the other side the doctrine of man's free 
agency and the bringing to the rendering of the declarations of 
the Scriptures and of the standards the lights of modern modes 
of interpretation." This battle soon assumed the character of an 
assault upon Dr. Lyman Beecher for the purpose of his destruc- 
tion. His son knew it to be wholly without justification and as 
senseless as it was wicked. He knew his father's earnestness, de- 
votion, and unselfishness, the sacrifices he had made to take up 
this work, felt how greatly he deserved the gratitude of all 
Christian men ; and when he saw that father attacked for heresy 
and brought before every tribunal of the Presbyterian Church, 
except the highest, for trial, and all because his construction of 
the Presbyterian Confession was not according to the views of 
one or two of the leaders of that Church in the West, he was not 
more indignant than disgusted. 

He saw him triumphantly acquitted by one body after an- 
other, but still pursued by suspicion, and knew that a conspiracy 
had been formed in which some of his Eastern friends and one 
or more Eastern seminaries were enlisted, with the avowed in- 
tention of crushing him, and all this mostly by good men, under 
the strong bias of ecclesiastical prejudice and in a mistaken zeal 
for God's service. 

We must feel his disgust as he was compelled to go scurrying 



I52 BIOGRAPHY OF 

through the country, not to rescue souls from danger nor to for- 
ward any great moral end, but to anticipate the action of some 
presbytery or arrange for some meeting of synod ; we must real- 
ize his indignation at seeing his father compelled to leave the 
death-bed of his mother to defend himself against these heresy- 
hunters, if we would understand the position which Mr. Beecher 
occupied towards ecclesiastical bodies in after-years. 

In a letter dated " Ca?ial Boat, Wednesday morning, Oct. 14, 
1835," Henry Ward gives an account of a meeting of Synod. 
After a humorous description of the eccentricities of Dr. Beecher, 
for which we have no space, he writes : "At length we are ready 
to start. A trunk tumbles out of one side as Thomas tumbles in 
the other. I reverse the order — tumble Tom out, the trunk in. 
At length all are aboard, and father drives out of the yard, hold- 
ing the reins in one hand, shaking hands with a student with the 
other, giving Charles directions with his mouth — at least that part 
not occupied with an apple ; for since apples were plenty he has 
made it a practice to drive with one rein in the right hand and 
the other in the left, with an apple in each, biting them alter- 
nately, thus raising and lowering the reins like threads on a loom. 
Away we go, Charley horse on a full canter down the long hill, 
the carriage bouncing and bounding over the stones, father alter- 
nately telling Tom how to get the harness mended and showing 
me the true doctrine of original sin. Hurrah ! we thunder along- 
side the boat just in time. . . . Yesterday the Synod was consti- 
tuted Old School. Moderator by a majority of seven, under his 
administration the system is beginning to assume form and be- 
comes apparent. All the committees are one way, and the whole 
aspect of affairs shows you that there is a deep-laid, regular plan, 
and the elders are all drilled in. The committee give leave of ab- 
sence to all New School men, and refuse all others, so that they 
may increase and we decrease. 

" It is Tuesday morning and everybody is talking, planning, 
plotting — all bustle ; heads together ; knots at every corner ; 
hands going up and down, and faces approaching earnestly or 
drawing back in doubt ; one taking hold of the other's coat, lead- 
ing off into one corner for a particular argument ; elders receiv- 
ing drill, some bolting the collar. Here, in my room, are father, 
George, and Mr. Rankin. They are looking over the ground, 
prognosticating, arranging for the onset, or for the reception of 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. I 53 

an onset. ... I never saw so many faces of clergymen, and so 
few of them intellectual faces. . . . And the elders are just what 
forty or fifty common farmers would be supposed to be — except 
that for eldership the soberest men are chosen, and, as stupidity is 
usually graced with more gravity than great good sense, the body of 
elders are not quite so acute in look as the higher class of work- 
ingmen." 

Although written in a playful mood, it is evident that he had 
no fancy for such work, and as he advanced his dislike increased. 
The broad, kindly, hospitable living, the strong, practical, sympa- 
thetic preaching, and the honest dislike of all the rattle of eccle- 
siastical machinery, which marked his after-life, came naturally 
from the training he received on the outside of Lane Seminary. 

The influences of the place in which he lived as well as of 
the times were powerful factors in his theological education. 
The great West, with its boundless possibilities which had so 
moved the spirit of his father, lay before him, and stirred 
his imagination as at an earlier period the sea had done. And, 
as when he looked out upon the broad Atlantic from the 
wharves of Boston he had felt the impulse to go forth to 
be a sailor, command ships, and fight naval battles, so did 
the movement of the great streams of population Westward, and 
the vast field that stretched out before him like the ocean, 
move his spirit to go forth upon the sea of human life and con- 
quer for Christ. 

In this period of theological study, when the most of students 
withdraw themselves as much as possible from real life, he was 
brought to face it in some of its most intense forms. Cincinnati 
was then the central and most important city of the great West ; 
an immense commerce was carried on from its wharves ; it was 
the point where gathered the multitudes that were going out to 
occupy the new territory ; it was still the rendezvous for fron- 
tiersmen ; more than this, it lay upon the border-land between 
the free and slave States, and already felt the uneasiness and bit- 
terness of the irresistible conflict. Chain-gangs of slaves were 
continually passing on the decks of the steamboats, to be sold 
down South, and fugitives from bondage were keeping the sym- 
pathy or the hatred of the people in continual activity. Life 
of high pressure and in great variety was presented to Henry 
Ward Beecher there in the heart of the great West in the years 



I 5 4 BIO GRAPH Y OF 

of 1 834-1 83 7 ; life that was very real, and that called not so 
much for fine-spun theories as for practical forces ; not for dead 
and formal dogmas, but for living truth, for Him who is both 
Life and Truth. 

True, he might have measurably kept himself from it and im- 
mured himself in the library and class-rooms of the Seminary, but 
he followed an entirely opposite course ; he lectured, wrote anti- 
slavery editorials, joined the citizens' body of police for the pre- 
servation of order, every way keeping himself in sympathy with 
the stirring times in which he lived, and they helped to make 
him the living, practical preacher he afterwards became. 

His Bible-class, to which he gave great attention, both in 
preparation and in teaching the lesson, afforded him a field for the 
application of the truths he had learned, and for testing the 
methods he had adopted. 

Yet for the most of the time his mind was not settled. His ideal 
of the Christian ministry was so high that he sometimes despaired 
of ever attaining it, and at times he seems to have seriously con- 
templated giving up his preparation for the ministry and of de- 
voting himself to some other pursuit. Mrs. Beech er says that 
through these years his letters were very full of the discomforts and 
doubts that troubled him. "... Sometimes I think I shall not 
succeed in anything. If, when my course here is finished, they 
will not license me, suppose I go far West, enter a homestead (?), 
clear the wood off, build a little log hut, work during the week, 
and hunt up the settlers and hold conference and prayer meetings 
— will you come to me if that is all I can offer you ? " Then, 
perhaps, in the next letter : " I will preach, if it is in the by- 
ways and hedges ; but oh ! for more light to see my way clear ! " 
" During the last two years his letters had less of this depression. 
He would preach, whether men would hear or whether they 
would forbear." " But I must preach the Gospel as it is re- 
vealed to me, not as it is laid down in the schools." 

He gives his experience in these words : 

" During the latter part of my stay in college my feelings were 
unsettled. Sometimes they inclined one way and sometimes the 
other, until I went to Lane Seminary. I was then twenty years 
old, and there came a great revulsion in me from all this inchoate, 
unregulated, undirected experience in religion. My mind took 
one tremendous spring over into scepticism, and I said : ' I have 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECH ER. I 5 5 

been a fool long enough.' I refused to be any longer played upon 
in such a way. It was bitter, it was malignant, it was sad, it was 
sorrowful; but it was wholesale, and swept away ten thousand fic- 
tions and external observances. I said : ' I will not stir one step 
further than I can see my way, and I will not stand a moment 
where I cannot see the truth. I will have something that is 
sure and steadfast.' Having taken that ground, I was in that 
state of mind for the larger part of two years. 

" It then pleased God to lift upon me such a view of Christ 
as one whose nature and office it is to have infinite and exquisite 
pity upon the weakness and want of sinners as I had never had 
before. I saw that He had compassion upon them because they 
were sinners, and because He wanted to help them out of their 
sins. It came to me like the bursting forth of spring. It was as 
if yesterday there was not a bird to be seen or heard, and as if 
to-day the woods were full of singing, birds. There rose up 
before me a view of Jesus as the Saviour of sinners — not of 
saints, but of sinners unconverted, before they were any better — 
because they were so bad and needed so much ; and that view 
has never gone from me. It did not at first fill the whole 
heaven ; it came as a rift along the horizon ; gradually, little by 
little, the cloud rolled up. It was three years before the whole 
sky was cleared so that I could see all around, but from that 
hour I felt that God had a father's heart ; that Christ loved me in 
my sin ; that while I was a sinner He did not frown upon me nor 
cast me off, but cared for me with unutterable tenderness, and 
would help me out of sin ; and it seemed to me that I had every- 
thing I needed. When that vision was vouchsafed to me I felt 
that there was no more for me to do but to love, trust, and adore ; 
nor has there ever been in my mind a doubt since that I did 
love, trust, and adore. There has been an imperfect compre- 
hension, there have been grievous sins, there have been long 
defections ; but never for a single moment have I doubted the 
power of Christ's love to save me, any more than I have doubted 
the existence in the heaven of the sun by day and the moon by 
night." 

We have thus followed Henry Ward Beecher from the cradle 
to the moment that he stands prepared to enter upon his life- 
work ; have noted every step of his course from the hills to the 
sea, from school to college, from the East to the West ; have 



I56 REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

marked the influences of the home, of nature, of the city, of 
school, college, and seminary, of the times, of the Word and 
Spirit of God ; have traced his experiences, felt his dawning 
strength, examined the life he lived, the dispositions he mani- 
fested, the hopes he cherished, and the character he formed ; 
and in our confidence and admiration choose, as not inappropri- 
ate for him at this time, the description of " The Patrone of true 
Holinesse " in the " Faerie Queene " : 

" Full iolly knight he seemed, and faire did sitt, 
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt ; 
And on his brest a bloodie crosse he bore, 
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord, 
For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore, 
And dead, as living ever, Him ador'd : 
Upon his shield the like was also scor'd, 
For soveraine hope, which in His helpe he had, 
Right faithfull true he was in deede and word ; 
But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad ; 
Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad." 



CHAPTER IX. 

Call to Preach — License — Examination by Miami Presbytery — Refusal to 
Subscribe to Old School — Ordination by Oxford Presbytery — Visit 
East — Marriage — Housekeeping. 

IN the early spring of 1837 Mr. Beecher graduated from Lane 
Seminary. In accordance with the practice of the Presby- 
terian Church, a clergyman might be licensed to preach, 
even though not ordained ; but such license could only be ob- 
tained after the applicant had appeared before the Presbytery 
for examination, and he was required also to read a " trial lec- 
ture," as it was called. Agreeably to this custom, upon graduat- 
ing from the Seminary Mr. Beecher went before the Cincinnati 
Presbytery, was examined, and read his "trial lecture." The ex- 
amination and lecture seem to have been satisfactory, for he was 
duly licensed to preach. 

For a few weeks prior to his examination for license he 
preached in a little hall at Covington, Kentucky, just across the 
river from Cincinnati. He seriously contemplated settling there 
as soon as he should be licensed. 

" After preaching there [Covington] three or four Sundays I 
was called, by Martha Sawyer, a Yankee woman, to go to Law- 
renceburg and preach. There was a church in that place, com- 
posed of about twenty members, of which she was the factotum. 
She collected the money, she was the treasurer, she was the man- 
ager, she was the trustee, she was the everything of that church." 

At this time the pulpit of the little, struggling Presbyterian 
church at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, was vacant, and one of the 
ladies of that church came up to Cincinnati to see if Bishop Little 
could not secure for them a pastor. The good bishop introduced 
her to young Henry Ward Beecher. This led to his preaching 
one or two trial sermons at Lawrenceburg. The result of the 
experiment seemed to be satisfactory on both sides, although the 
first sermon was said to have been a lamentable failure through 
the nervous apprehensions of the young preacher in facing the 
unusually large audience of one hundred persons. 

157 



I58 BIOGRAPHY OF 

In May, 1837, he moved to Lawrenceburg and began 
preaching regularly as a licentiate, not yet ordained. 

It may not be uninteresting to read just here the brief memo- 
randa from the journal which he was keeping then : 

"May 4 [1837]. — Returned from Lawrenceburg. I think 
seriously of settling there — a destitute place indeed. . . . 

" If I go to Lawrenceburg, remember you can gain men 
easily if you get round their prejudices and put truth in their 
minds; but never if you attack prejudices. Look well at this. . . . 

" Mem.— My people must be alert to make the church agree- 
able, to give seats and wait on strangers, etc." 

" June 15, Thursday. — To-day received call from Lawrence- 
burg, and a very nattering call it was and did my heart good. 
Meeting called June 12, 1837 ; about 30 persons present. Mr. 
Hunt, moderator ; D. S. Mayer, sec. Vote for me unanimous. 
Blank filled for $250, with but one dissenting voice (he voting 
for double that sum)." 

"Monday, July 10. — Sat. eve., 8th, arrived here permanently 
to remain. . . . 

" I mean to write down little plans and devices for pastoral 
labor as they occur ; I may else forget them. 

" 1. In different districts get men quietly to feel themselves re- 
sponsible for progress of temperance or Sunday-schools. 

" 2. Quietly to visit from house to house and secure congre- 
gations. 

" 3. Secure a large congregation. Let this be the jirst thing. 
For this — 

" 1. Preach well uniformly. 

" 2. Visit widely and produce a personal attachment; also 

wife do same. 
" 3. Get the young to love me. 

"4. See that the church have this presented as a dejinite 
thing, and set them to this work just as directly as I 
would to raising a fund, building, etc. 

"4. Little girls' societies for benevolent purposes." 

The town was-small, scarce fifteen hundred inhabitants, locat- 
ed at the junction of the Ohio and Miami rivers — just across 
the Miami from Ohio on the east, and the Ohio River from 
Kentucky on the south — subject to devastating floods from both 
rivers impartially. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. I 59 

The church was small, with meagre accommodations, the 
people poor. We quote his description of the place and 
church : 

"You can form some conception of that field when I tell 
you that it was a place where they had four gigantic distil- 
leries, from which was carried to market a steamboat-load of 
liquor every day. When I went there and entered upon my 
vocation of preaching, I found a church, occupying a little 
brick building, with nineteen or twenty members. There was 
one man, and the rest were women. With the exception of two 
persons, there was not one of them who was not obliged to 
gain a livelihood by the labor of the hands. So you will 
understand how very poor they were. I could not, of course, 
obtain my living in so small a church, and in a community that 
was not overblessed with wealth. I was taken up, therefore, 
as a pensioner by the Home Missionary Society, and my first 
two years were spent in the field as a missionary, in part sup- 
ported by the funds of this society. 

" I was sexton in the church. There were no lamps there, 
so I went and bought some, and filled them and lit them. I 
swept the church and lighted my own fires. I did not ring the 
bell, because there was none. I opened the church before every 
meeting, and shut and locked it after every meeting. I took care 
of everything in the church." 

Here in this little frontier village, then upon the very bor- 
ders of civilization, began his real work. For twenty-four years 
he had been preparing for this step. Now it must be determined 
whether his life should be a success or a failure. 

The year passed uneventfully, and it was not until September, 
1838, when he applied for ordination, that he got his first taste of 
trouble. 

At this time the division between the Old School and the New 
School Presbyterian churches was about to take place, and two 
General Assemblies, afterwards called the Old School General 
Assembly and the New School General Assembly, were, a short 
time later, convened in Philadelphia. A resolution was intro- 
duced into the Oxford Presbytery that no man should be licensed 
or ordained by that body who did not connect himself with the 
Old School Presbyterian Church, dropping from their care those 
who declined to do so. 






l6o BIOGRAPHY OF 

This resolution, it was thought, was probably aimed at Mr. 
Beecher * — an attempt to strike the father over the shoulders of 
his son. For the actual division and separation of the Presby- 
terian Church into Old and New School was in no small measure 
the result of the controversy carried on for several years pre- 
viously against Dr. Lyman Beecher. The doctor in 1832 had, as 
we have seen, accepted the presidency and professorship of doc- 
trinal theology in Lane Seminary. He had been brought up in, 
and had been connected with, the Congregational Church until 
this time. While he entertained no revolutionary spirit, he had 
some expectation that the free spirit of New England thought, 
and that loving spirit of voluntary co-operation which he had 
enjoyed so in his New England pastorate, might be infused into 
the forms of Presbyterianism. The idea of an intimate friend- 
ship and co-operation between the Congregational and Presbyte- 
rian churches in the United States had always been dear to him. 

But when he went to Cincinnati there had already commenced 
in different quarters a movement aiming at greater stringency 
and the expulsion from the Presbyterian Church of what was 
called the New England element, of which Dr. Beecher was an 
eminent representative. His settlement at Lane Seminary was 
followed by a more active demonstration of hostility. Formal 
charges of heresy, slander, and hypocrisy were preferred against 
him, to which reference has already been made. 

These proceedings produced a very markedly unfavorable 
impression in the public mind against Presbyterianism. They 
had only ended at about the time his son, Henry Ward, came 
to Lawrenceburg. 

There was a good deal of feeling in the two branches of the 
Presbyterian Church, and when Mr. Beecher applied to the Ox- 
ford Presbytery, within whose jurisdiction Lawrenceburg was 
located, a good deal of interest was aroused. A son of Dr. 
Lyman Beecher was to be examined by a presbytery known to 
be in marked hostility to him. It would be a good chance to 



* " It is no inconsiderable matter in these days that Dr. Beecher has at 
least one son who, after a full and free examination before the Oxford 
Presbytery, has been pronounced to be orthodox and sound in the faith ; 
and that, in order to exclude the son of the arch-heretic, a new term of 
ministerial communion had to be introduced" (Extract from letter of Dr. 
Bishop, President of Oxford College, to Mr. Beecher in 1838). 



REV. HENRY WARD BELCHER. i6l 

demonstrate the laxity and heterodoxy of Dr. Beecher. For, of 
course, the young man would only reflect the father's views. 

The presbytery duly met in session in September, 1838, and 
Henry Ward appeared before them. Writing to his brother 
George, he refers to his examination. After telling of his family 
affairs he says : 

"So much for family news — a quiet lake; now for public 
affairs — a troubled ocean casting up mud and dirt. 

" I went some sixty miles up into Preble County, near Eaton, 
before Oxford Presbytery. Presented my papers. Father 
Craigh was appointed to squeak the questions. They examined 
me to their hearts' content. I was a model to behold, and so were 
they ! Elders opened their mouths, 'gave their noses a fresh 
blowing, fixed their spectacles, and hitched forward on their 
seats. The ministers clinched their confessions of faith with 
desperate fervor and looked unutterably orthodox, while Gra- 
ham and a few friendly ones looked a little nervous, not knowing 
how the youth would stand fire. There he sat, the young can- 
didate begotten of a heretic, nursed at Lane ; but, with such a 
name and parentage and education, what remarkable modesty, 
extraordinary meekness, and how deferential to the eminently 
acute questioners who sat gazing upon the prodigy ! Certainly 
this was a bad beginning. Having predetermined that I should 
be hot and forward and full of confidence, it was somewhat 
awkward, truly, to find such gentleness and teachableness ! 

" Then came the examination : ' Will the mon tell us in what 
relation Adam stood to his posterity ? ' 'In the relation of a 
federal head. 1 ' What do you mean by a federal head ? ' 'A head 
with whom God made a covenant for all his posterity.' Then 
questions on all the knotty points. ' Still the wonder grew,' for 
the more the lad was examined the more incorrigibly orthodox 
did he grow, until they began to fear he was a leetle too orthodox 
upon some points. What was to be done ? The vote on receiv- 
ing me was una?iimous ! Well, they slept upon it. Next day, 
while settling the time of my ordination, Prof. McArthur, of Ox- 
ford, moved to postpone the business to take up some resolu- 
tions. In the first they i sincerely adhered to the Old School Pby. 
Assembly ' ; second, required that all licentiates and candidates 
under their care should do the same or be no longer such. I 
declined acknowledging it to be the true one. Father Craigh 



1 6 2 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

'whom my orthodoxy had softened) said they would give me six 
mouths to think and decide, and I might continue to preach in 
their bounds. I refused, and they turned me out and gave me 
my papers back again. I asked them what the duty of my 
church was. They replied that it was vacant — just what they had 
to say, and just what I wanted them to say, and, moreover, just 
what I determined they should say. I drove home forthwith ; 
got back on Saturday. On Sunday recounted from the pulpit 
the doings of Pby., and declared them vacant if they continued 
under Oxford ; appointed a meeting for Wednesday p.m. for 
their action. By a unanimous vote they withdrew from Oxford 
and declared themselves an Independent Pbyn. ch. Now for Sy- 
nod. The Old School called a convention to meet two days be- 
fore Synod met ; cut out a series of resolutions going for O. S. 
Assembly, cutting off those who had officially joined the Consti- 
tutional Assembly, etc., etc. After sermon by Jno. Rankin, 
Stowe and Coe nominated for moderator — Stowe 47, Coe 70. 
The New School then determined simply to urge on to voting. 
All speaking was on one side. When they had passed the reso- 
lutions to the one cutting off all who had joined N. S. Assembly 
they inserted a new one, by which majority of Cincinnati Presbytery 
were ejected! Jno. Rankin then rose and declared the body dis- 
solved, and as moderator of last Synod would give them time to 
leave the house, and would then form the true Synod. They 
prayed and adjourned to Wilson's. It was queer. l Synod of Cin- 
cinnati will adjourn to meet at 7 in 1st Pby. ch.'; 'Synod Cin. 
will now come to order,' etc. I left after this and both bodies 
were still in session. I stepped in a moment Saturday morning 
just before leaving, and they were then passing in our Synod a 
resolution not to allow any slave-holder in our connection Mills 
agreed to it. I did not wait to hear votes, but presume it was 
nearly unanimous. Synod declared the whole ground formerly 
held by Oxford Pby. to be held by the Cin. Pby. Stowe has just 
written me that Graham, Thomas, Chidlow, Merril, Crothers, 
Dickey, and others have formally withdrawn from the Old School 
Synod, but not yet united with ours. This is a brief sketch of 
matters ecclesiastical. Pby. of Cin. will begin their new authority 
over former territory of Oxford Pby., by coming here to ordain 
me on Thurs., Nov. 8 [1838]." 

The New School Presbytery met in Cincinnati, and before 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 163 

this body Mr. Beecher applied for ordination, the minutes of 
which record that it ordained and installed him November 9, 
1838, over the independent church at Lawrenceburg, Dr. Ly- 
man Beecher presiding, Dr. Blanchard charging the pastor, and 
Dr. Calvin E. Stowe, .his brother-in-law, charging the people. 

Mr. Beecher felt that the division in the Church was wholly 
uncalled for, but naturally was unwilling to desert the school to 
which he was attached by its more liberal and democratic policy, 
by the associations of his education, and the ties of filial love and 
admiration. The bitterness of this controversy in the body of the 
Church, and the utter folly of a great Church, organized for the 
work of saving men's souls, wasting its strength in harsh recrimi- 
nations and angry feuds over matters which seemed to him of 
minor importance, and finally splitting the Church into two hos- 
tile bodies, produced a profound impression upon Mr. Beecher's 
mind, and developed rapidly that trait, doubtless then latent, 
which has so markedly characterized his preaching since then — a 
disregard of mere forms, provided he could secure the substance. 
And so he grew to look upon all denominations as his brethren, 
wholly disregarding the formal differences that existed, rejoicing 
heartily in all their successes, and wishing them God-speed, see- 
ing only the objects for which all labored — the enlightenment of 
the world, the saving of mankind. He was always willing to co- 
operate. He never withheld his hand or voice, when there was a 
chance to help a struggling church, because it was of a different 
denomination from his own. 

He gave another account of these experiences and their effect 
upon his mind, in some remarks at one of his Friday-night meet- 
ings, suggested by the meeting, in the spring of 1869, of the As- 
semblies of the Old and New Schools, and their reunion as one 
body at that time : 

" My whole life has more or less taken its color from the con- 
troversy which led to the division of the Old School and the New 
School Presbyterians. I was brought up in New England, a min- 
ister's son, the son of a minister who was doctrinally inclined and 
whose warmest friends were great doctrinarians. My father's 
household was substantially a debating society. As early as I 
can remember I knew enough to discuss foreordination, and I 
could do it as well as my betters. I could go just as far as they 
could, could run against snags at the same spots that they did, 



164 BIOGRAPHY OF 

and could not get off any better than they could. All those great 
doctrines which tend powerfully to enlarge the imagination and 
to sharpen the reason without feeding them were, I had almost 
said, matters of daily conversation in my father's family. When 
I went to college I fell under the influence of a young minister 
who became an Old School Presbyterian. He was a man of large 
brain and marked ability. He had a naturally philosophic mind. 
He was noble- hearted and genial. I remember that my poetic 
temperament, alongside of his rigorous, logical temperament, used 
to seem to me mean and contemptible. I thought he was like a 
big oak-tree, while I was more like a willow, half-grown and pliant, 
yielding to every force that was exerted upon it. At any rate, he 
had a powerful influence upon my development. But as I came 
to the possession of myself more and more I took on the logical 
methods in the exercise of the reasoning faculty which God had 
implanted in me, and they came near wrecking me ; for I became 
sceptical, not malignantly but honestly, and it was to me a matter 
of great distress and anguish. It continued for years, and no 
logic ever relieved me. My brother Charles went through the 
same process, and he came back in the same way that I did, 
through the instrumentality of a living Saviour. An abstract, 
philosophical statement of the truth never met my wants, but 
when there arose over the horizon a vision of the Lord Jesus 
Christ as a living Friend, who had the profoundest personal inte- 
rest in me, I embraced that view and was lifted up. My heart 
did for me then what my head had failed to do. This was an 
experience which has constituted one of the greatest affirmative 
forces that have acted on my mind in preaching. All my life 
long I have had a strong disposition to so preach the truth as to 
meet the wants of men who stand not only outside of the churches 
but outside of belief. I suppose that as long as I live I shall 
think of the truth, not as it looks to those that are within the 
Church, but as it looks to those that are outside of the Church 
and outside of belief itself. 

" This has given to my preaching an element of naturalism. 
It has led me to seek for a ground on which I could stand and 
bring men to a knowledge of the love of Christ. I have gone far 
from the usual narrow ecclesiastical and theological rules to broad- 
er social methods by which men that are doubters can be reached. 

" My first settlement as a pastor was at Lawrenceburg, Indi- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 1 65 

ana, where I was two years in the Presbyterian Church. When I 
left Lane Seminary I went down there to preach, and I thought 
nothing about Church connection. My business, as I supposed, 
was to preach what little I knew and to lead men to the Saviour ; 
but I soon felt, for the first time, the authority of the Church. I 
had not been ground ; I was nothing but corn, and I had to be run 
through a mill. This Lawrenceburg church was in the territory 
of the Miami Presbytery. The Presbytery was not only a body 
of Presbyterians, but was composed of Old School Presbyterians ; 
not only were they Old School Presbyterians, but they were 
Scotch-Irish Presbyterians ; and not only were they straight, but 
they bent like a hoop the other way. I had received an ordina- 
tion license at the Cincinnati Presbytery — where my father be- 
longed at that time — in about 1837 ; but it was necessary that I 
should undergo another examination. The Assemblies had not 
then divided ; there was only the one Church ; but there were 
two parties — the Old School and the New School. There was 
the one great body, but there were these two sections. There 
were presbyteries and synods of the New School, and there were 
presbyteries and synods of the Old School ; but they were under 
the same authority. 

"I went on horseback from Lawrenceburg to Oxford, where 
the Presbytery was in session. And, by the way, I came near los- 
ing my life in crossing the river. The water was high, and I was 
thrown into it ; but I got out and dried off, and started again, 
and reached my destination without any further mishap, and 
went through my examination. 

" At that time, under the instruction which I had had in my 
father's family, under the college drill that I had gone through, 
and under the training to which I was subjected in Lane Semi- 
nary, I had become so familiar with the doctrines of theology 
that it was difficult for any one to put me down in a discussion of 
them. I could state them very glibly. I was ready with an ex- 
planation of every single point connected with them. I knew all 
their proofs, all their dodging cuts, all their ins and outs. There- 
fore I had no trouble in standing my ground with the men w T ho 
examined me. They knew they had Dr. Beecher's son before 
them ; the questions came like hail, and I was very willing. 
Somehow I have always had a certain sympathy with human na- 
ture which has led me invariably, in my better moods, to see 



1 66 BIOGRAPHY OF 

instinctively, or to perceive by intuition, how to touch the right 
chord in people, how to reach the living principle in them ; and 
that faculty was fully awakened in me on this occasion. I recol- 
lect that the presiding clergyman at that Presbytery was a man 
that I had seen at my father's house and that I had taken a sort 
of fancy to. He was probably fifty or sixty years of age. He 
was tall, and was thin in the face, and he had a shrill, ringing 
voice. I felt that he was like a file ; but still I liked him. Well, 
he put questions to me. Some of them I answered directly, some 
ingeniously, some intelligently, and others somewhat obscurely. 
The examination extended over two or three hours ; and I 
thought I perceived a warming and melting influence among 
those men. I was quite indifferent as to whether or not I came 
out with their endorsement, and I have a recollection of feeling 
very fine. They questioned, and questioned, and questioned ; 
and it happened that the points on which they were very particu- 
lar were man's sinfulness, the influence of the Holy Ghost, its 
necessity, its work, the thoroughness of it, and so on. « 

" Now, I was always immensely orthodox — thunderingly so ; 
and when they thought they were going to get heresy they got a 
perfect avalanche of orthodoxy. This man whom I had seen at 
father's was quite carried away with me ; he shielded me and 
helped me over some rough places ; and the Presbytery, without 
a dissenting voice, voted that I was orthodox — to their amaze- 
ment and mine ! 

" I thought then that the bitterness of death was past, when 
lo ! a professor from Oxford University, Miami, introduced a 
resolution, which was passed, that that Presbytery would not 
license nor ordain any candidate who would not give in his ad- 
hesion to the Old School Presbyterian General Assembly. It 
was on that point that the Old and New Schools divided, and I, 
being my father's son, spurned the idea of going over to the Old 
School ; I felt as big as forty men ; and when that resolution 
passed I simply said: 'Well, brethren, I have nothing to do but 
to go back to my father's house.' They were kind to me ; they 
seemed to have conceived an affection for the young man ; they 
took the greatest pains to conciliate me ; they endeavored to 
smooth the way for me, and tried to persuade me to comply 
with their wish; but I was determined, and said, ' I won't.' I 
always had the knack of saying that and sticking to it ! 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 167 

" So I turned my back on the Oxford Presbytery, and rode 
to Lawrenceburg again ; and the next Sunday morning I an- 
nounced to my congregation the result of my week's pilgrimage, 
told them of the vote which declared their church vacant, and 
said to them : . Now, brethren, one of two things is necessary : 
you must get somebody else to preach for you, or you must de- 
clare yourselves independent of the Presbyterian Church.' It 
was no sooner said than done. Before sundown on that day they 
declared themselves an independent church, and I decided to 
stay with them. I was then ordained by the New School Pres- 
bytery in Cincinnati, after which I went on with my work regu- 
larly. 

"Preceding all this, you should recollect that during the 
three years that I was in the Seminary the controversy between 
the Old and New School Presbyterians ran very high on ques- 
tions of theology and on questions of Church authority. I had 
been stuffed with these things. I had eaten and drank them. I 
had chopped and hewed them. I had built up from them every 
sort of argument. I had had them ad nauseam. 

" When I went out into the field I found all the little churches 
ready to divide, such was the state of feeling throughout the 
whole West. Going into my work in the midst of that state of 
affairs, I made up my mind distinctly that, with the help of God, 
I would never engage in any religious contention. I remember 
riding through the woods for long, dreary days, and I recollect 
at one time coming out into an open place where the sun shone 
down through to the bank of the river, and where I had such a 
sense of the love of Christ, of the nature of His work on earth, of 
its beauty and its grandeur, and such a sense of the miserable- 
ness of Christian men quarrelling and seeking to build up antag- 
onistic churches — -in other words, the kingdom of Christ rose up 
before my mind with such supreme loveliness and majesty — that 
I sat in my saddle, I do not know how long (many, many min- 
utes ; perhaps half an hour), and there, all alone, in a great forest 
of Indiana, probably twenty miles from any house, prayed for 
that kingdom, saying audibly, ' I will never be a sectary.' I 
remember promising Christ that if He would strengthen me and 
teach me how to work I would all my life long preach for His 
kingdom and endeavor to love everybody who was doing that 
work. Not that I would accept others' belief, not that I would 



1 68 



BIOGRAPHY OF 



embrace their theology, not that I would endorse their ecclesias- 
tical organizations ; but whatever their instruments might be, if 
they were sincerely working for the kingdom of Christ I would 
never put a straw in their way and never strike a blow to their 
harm. By the grace of God I have kept that resolution to this 
day. There was so much good that came from the discussions 




Mr. Beecher at the Time of his Marriage. 



and quarrels of the Old and New Schools by which at that 
period of my ministry I was surrounded. So much for the influ- 
ence on my mind of those early scenes and experiences, which 
were more, in some respects, a theological school to me than 
Lane Seminary itself was." 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 



169 



Such was the beginning of his ministry. 

We may now retrace our steps a little to take a look at the 
beginning of his domestic life. 

For seven years, like Jacob of old, he had labored, waiting for 
the time when he could claim his wife. Of course, until he was 
settled somewhere with some definite income, it was folly to think 
of marrying. But when he began preaching on trial at Lawrence- 
burg, and it seemed probable that he might be called there, his 
mind ran forward to when, having a definite home, he might go 




Mrs. Beecher at the Time of her Marriage. 

East for his bride. In his journal we find one of his written 
reveries : 

"Spring, March 1, 1837. — The winter has gone. Spring has 
come — the time of the singing of birds. How vividly does that 
little expression call up the whole scene — the bright sun, the 
mild air, the heaven full of sweet influences, and the green 
sprouting grass among patches of snow, and the swelling buds ! 
Every voice echoes in the air, and all sounds are mellow. The 
falling of a plank, the pound of a hammer or beetle, the rumble of 
a wagon, all, this morning, sound like joyful music. But I have 



I 70 BIOGRAPHY OF 

one thought sweeter than any of these, which makes these sweet : 
it is that now only spring and summer are to fly before I meet 
my dear wife, not again to be parted, except by death ! " 

In July, 1837, having been formally called, though before his 
ordination — it then being apparent that he was to be definitely 
settled at Lawrenceburg — he wrote to Miss Bullard, suggesting 
that their marriage be celebrated shortly after his ordination, 
which was then expected to be in the following September. He 
had no sooner written and mailed the letter when he said to him- 
self, as he explained to his wife later : " Why should I wait for 
my ordination ? Why not have my wife present at it ? And I 
started that very afternoon." 

His letter reached Miss Bullard in the morning of Saturday, 
July 29, and he himself appeared in the evening of the same day, 
to the great surprise of all. His plan was explained, and after a 
hasty discussion August 3 was fixed on for the wedding, and 
three o'clock in the afternoon the hour. 

" I was expected to be ready to leave in the afternoon of 
August 3," writes Mrs. Beecher. " The wedding-dress and wed- 
ding-cake were to be made — for what New England damsel could 
be married without wedding-cake ? At one o'clock Monday 
morning I began my work, sewing until the family were up. 
After the breakfast was over the materials for the wedding-cake 
were brought from the village store, and Henry and I began the 
work for the cake. He picked over and stoned the raisins — taking 
abundant toll while doing it — beating the eggs, and in every way 
made himself useful, and kept the whole family in good spirits 
and cheerful, when, but for him, in such hurried preparations we 
might have felt the great exertion severely. But the work was 
done, and the 3d of August dawned bright and rosy. 

" Very few guests were invited outside of the brothers and 
sisters, with their families, who were near enough to the old home 
to reach us. Both my sisters were married in a storm, and I 
had always said I would not be. Three o'clock was the hour ap- 
pointed for the wedding. About two a heavy thunder-shower 
came on, and it began to rain, thunder, and lighten. At three 
o'clock we were summoned, but I said : ' Wait until the storm 
passes,' and, in spite of their remonstrance, they did wait. At 
four o'clock the clouds broke away and the sun appeared, and we 
were ushered into the parlor, Henry and I together. Just as we 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. I J [ 

were entering the door (it was very warm, and door and windows 
all open) a rainbow ', the most brilliant I ever saw, and so re- 
marked by all in the room, seemed through the open window to 
span the parlor, and the spectators said we walked under its arch 
to our places. In his prayer the clergyman spoke of the ' bow 
of peace and promise,' which he hoped was the beautiful symbol 
of what our lives were to be. 

" We rode to Worcester after the long farewells were said, not 
expecting to meet the home friends again for years." 

A few days later Mr. Beecher wrote from New York to his 
sister, Mrs. Stowe: 

" My very dear Sister : 

" Before this gets to you, you will have begun to look for us 
and wonder that we do not write or come. This is to certify that 
we are alive, safely and thoroughly married. Coming, and came 
as far as New York. Now, this damsel, my most comely wife, 
longing for the leeks and cucumbers of Boston, did freely eat 
thereof, and these, as in duty bound, did most freely hurt her. 
Three days she bore it, but on arriving at New York they had 
come well-nigh to the cholera morbus ; and thus we are detained 
for a few days. The doctor's prescriptions have acted like a 
charm. She is relieved, and rapidly grows better. Nevertheless, 
it being now Thursday, we shall tarry until Monday for her to 
gain strength, and then, God willing, we shall set our faces west- 
ward and travel like the wind. We were married on Thursday 
afternoon, at four o'clock, August the third. We went immedi- 
ately to Worcester, to Mr. Barton's. Nothing could surpass his 
delicate kindness to us. 

" I preached a preparatory lecture to the three churches on 
Friday p.m., and preached twice for Mr. Peabody on Sunday. 
Monday left for Boston. Stayed untiK Tuesday of the week en- 
suing. Preached in Bowdoin church in the morning of Sunday, 
and at Park Street in the p.m. Was invited to preach all day 
at Bowdoin, and also all day at Odeon, but preferred my course. 
Left for New York on Tuesday noon ; arrived next morning. Am 
at Rev. Mr. Jones's (Mrs. Beecher's brother-in-law), and very 
pleasantly situated. Lucy Ann is a dear, sweet sister, and Mr. 
Jones a most amiable and well-read, gentlemanly man. Probably 



I 72 



BIOGRAPHY OF 



I shall preach here on the Sabbath, but nothing has yet been 
definitely said. 

" Shall return by Pittsburgh, leaving this place on Monday 
next, if God wills. At that rate you may calculate upon seeing 
us somewhere about the middle of the week ensuing. 

" Ah ! Harriet, how I long to see you and Calvin. I shall 
soon show you my dear, dear wife. I grow more and more proud 
of her every day. . . . 

" Love to all — for I love you all, even to the little homely kit- 
ten — and love to all our folks, Margaret Hastings and all. 
" Yours most affectionately, dear Harriet, 

" H. W. B." 

Leaving New York, they started westward, partly by rail, 
partly by steamer, and not a little by the slow method of the 
canal ; travelled day and night, until they finally reached Cincin- 
nati the last of August. 

From Mrs. Beecher's memory we obtain her impressions of 
their first pastorate : 

" We remained a few days at Walnut Hills, and then took the 
little steamer with a free pass to Lawrenceburg. We were to 
board for the present, as we did not think that eighteen cents in 
pocket and three hundred dollars a year prospective salary would 
enable us to begin housekeeping. Lawrenceburg was a small 
place on the Miami. 

" Mr. Beecher was obliged to take charge of that part of the 
building in which he was to preach. Together we went every 
Saturday afternoon, swept and dusted the room, filled the lard- 
oil lamps, and laid the wood and kindlings ready for him to start 
the fire the next morning before service, when needed ; for the 
members of the church were all, except a few families, poor la- 
boring people, with all they could attend to at home. 

"But curiosity to hear the young preacher filled the room the 
first Sabbath, and from that time it continued to be filled — crowd- 
ed. The Methodist church had always been the fashionable 
church, where the wealthy and more refined part of the popula- 
tion worshipped. This little Presbyterian church had almost 
died out, and, when first requested to preach there, neither Mr. 
Beecher nor the people had any thought of his coming for more 
than that one Sabbath. But his manner of preaching was so very 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. I 73 

different from what they had been accustomed to — so original 
— that they wanted to hear him again, and after that they gave 
him a call to settle there. The Home Missionary Society were 
to give $150, and the little band who composed the church 
thought they could manage to raise $150 — in all $300 — and the 
call was accepted, notwithstanding the remonstrance of friends 
in Cincinnati. They were more ambitious for him than he was 
for himself, knowing that he could doubtless, in a short time, 
get a better settlement. They knew, also, he intended to marry 
as soon as his theological course was finished, and thought him 
wild to think of bringing a wife out West and expect to be able 
to live on three hundred dollars a year. But from the first he 
acted up to the advice he always gave in after-years to young 
graduates from theological seminaries : ' Dont hang round idle, 
waiting for a good offer. Enter the first field God opens for you. 
If He needs you in a larger one He will open the gate for you to 
enter.' And so he did. 

" From his first sermon in Lawrenceburg that little room was 
crowded. He did not extemporize so entirely, at first, as in later 
years— at least he wrote more copious notes — but those who 
knew him can well imagine that when warmed up by his subject 
his notes did not hold him very closely. 

" How vividly I recall that first Sabbath ! How young, how 
boyish he did look ! And how indignant I felt, when some of 
the ' higher classes ' came in out of simple curiosity, to see the 
surprised, almost scornful looks that were interchanged ! 

" He read the first hymn, and read it well — as they had never 
heard their own ministers (often illiterate, uneducated men) read 
hymns. I watched the expression change on their faces. Then 
the first prayer ! It was a revelation to them, and when he began 
the sermon the critical expression had vanished, and they evi- 
dently settled themselves to hear in earnest. 

" The next Sunday the interest was still more strongly marked. 
His preaching was to them something unusual. It was evident 
the hearers were not quite at ease. He woke them up, and they 
were not quite prepared to decide whether they were anxious to 
be so thoroughly aroused. They were not exactly comfortable, 
and some went away, after the services were over, a little irritated 
and half-decided never to hear him again. 

" The next Sabbath they concluded it would not hurt them 

'See Appendix A." 



I 74 BIOGRAPHY OF 

to go just this one time more, and from that time were constant 
attendants. The satisfaction with this young preacher increased, 
and many from all sects came regularly." 

On his return from the East with his young wife, not feeling 
that they could afford to undertake housekeeping, he accepted 
the hospitality of one of his elders, who had offered him a room 
in his house. There they lived for some little time, when the 
sudden death of a member of the family and the necessity of a 
change in the good elder's domestic arrangements required the 
use of this room. 

At this time Mr. Beecher was attending a synodical meeting at 
Cincinnati. Mrs. Beecher set to work at once to get board else- 
where. Failing in this, she sought to hire rooms. After hunting 
until nearly exhausted she secured the refusal of two rooms over 
a stable down by the banks of the Miami, which had been occu- 
pied by the hostler, rental forty dollars per annum. 

She immediately took the boat to Cincinnati, and then, being 
too poor to hire a wagon, she walked to Walnut Hills, four miles 
from Cincinnati — which was then the home of the Beecher family 
— to report on the state of affairs to her husband. A hasty exami- 
nation of his finances showed just sixty-eight cents. As they had 
no household furniture of any kind, the prospect was not alluring. 
But an ability to get along somehow was a characteristic of those 
days. Friends, though not over-rich themselves, were able each 
to furnish something. One supplied half of an old carpet, an- 
other some knives and forks, a third a few sheets and pillow- 
cases, then a bedstead, a stove ; and little by little, before they re- 
turned home that night, there was gathered together enough to 
meet the absolute requirements of living. Later the sale of Mrs. 
Beecher's cloak realized thirty dollars. The salary, though nomi- 
nally $500 per annum, was in fact but $300, of which one-half 
was paid by the Home Missionary Society, and neither half paid 
with great regularity. Any industrious day-laborer of modern 
times would have been ill-content with either income or home 
possessions. 

Returning from Walnut Hills, the next thing was to cleanse 
the rooms and settle down. Mrs. Beecher gives a graphic ac- 
count of their first housekeeping : u When we reached our former 
boarding-house we found our good friends with whom we had 
boarded very blue because their pastor and wife could find no 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. I 75 

better rooms ; but the lady was a true New England woman and 
knew how soon a little hard labor would change the looks of the 
rooms. Old Toby, their colored man, brought round, the next 
morning, two pails and scrub-brushes and plenty of soap, and 
Henry and I went to work with great energy. Think of father 
with sleeves rolled up, a big apron on, scrubbing the floors ! 
But I confess I never had known anything so hard to clean. To- 
bacco-stains and all manner of dirt that might have been looked 
for from the former occupants was so soaked into the floor that it 
seemed impossible to remove the stains. I asked the landlord if 
we might get some paint and paint the floors. ' Oh ! no. That 
would injure the wood I ' 

" In a day or two the rooms were as clean as faithful, hard 
work could make them, and after our last breakfast with our kind 
friends we bade them good-morning, with thanks and a blessing, 
and went to get our furniture, which the good captain of the 
steamboat had stored until we were ready. With it came some 
groceries, wash-tubs, and a nice painted dining-table, and a husk 
mattress, and husk pillows. 

" ' Where did these last things come from ? ' said your father. 

" ' Part of my cloak,' I replied, 'but not all of it.' 

" The kitchen-window looked out on a large back-yard that 
could be made a fine one with a little care, but among the rubbish 
I espied an old three-legged table and something that looked like 
the remains of small hanging shelves, I ran down stairs and 
asked the landlady if they had been thrown aside as worthless. 
'Oh! yes. They are good for nothing.' 'Then may I have 
them ? ' ' Certainly. But on examination you will find them of 
no use.' 

" I washed and cleaned them well, and called to Henry to take 
them up-stairs to our rooms. By the table I found the broken 
leg. With very little trouble the table was repaired, the hanging 
shelves put up, and both varnished. They proved to be mahoga- 
ny, and when the varnish was dry they looked quite nice. Among 
your father's very scanty wardrobe was an old coat past any 
mending. I took the skirt, cleaned it, and put it on the top of 
the table, and fastened the sides and ends with some strips of kid 
that I had brought from home. It did look quite fine, and you 
can hardly imagine how much pride and pleasure your father had 
with his writing-table. 



176 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" The long boxes made in Amherst expressly to pack his 
books in when he came West were well made of planed boards. 
These we set one atop of the other, open side out, and filled with 
books bought by his own labors while in college, teaching school, 
and making speeches. These made quite a fine addition to the 
room which was to be the parlor, study, and our bed-room all in 
one. 

" In the back room was a cook-stove given by brother George, 
and the old three-quarter bedstead that your father used at Lane 
Seminary, now all nice and clean, curtained with some four-cent 
calico Mrs. Judge Burnet gave us. Henry made the upright 
posts and ran a large wire round it on which the curtain was hung, 
with a wide tape all round the top on which our clothes were 
pinned. Crosswise from the door to the chimney a piece of four- 
cent calico curtained the corner where wash-benches and tubs, 
flour-barrel and sugar-barrel (the two last sent in by good friends) 
were placed, and over the door leading to the loft in the adjoin- 
ing store your father had nailed some large pieces to hold saddle, 
bridle, and buffalo-robe. On the other side of the range was a 
good dish-closet, and in front a sink. 

" So these two small rooms, at first so repulsive, were becom- 
ing quite a pleasant home. The house was situated very near 
the boat-landing on the wharf of the Miami River — too near 
for comfort when freshets swept down in that direction, but a 
pleasant outlook across on to the Kentucky hills ; the river some- 
times so low that your father has walked across and gathered 
flowers in Kentucky, then again rising so as to sweep everything 
before it as it did two years ago, utterly obliterating all that por- 
tion of Lawrenceburg where we lived." 

We are indebted to the Rev. John H. Thomas, the present 
pastor of Mr. Beecher's old church in Lawrenceburg, for the im- 
pressions of his ministry there, as gathered from the reminiscences 
of his surviving parishioners : 

"Mr, Beecher made his mark immediately. His youthful ap- 
pearance — he was but twenty-three — and his careless dress may 
have raised doubts as to his ability when his hearers first saw him, 
but they disappeared as soon as he began to speak. The charac- 
teristics of his later oratory were all present from the first — flu- 
ency, glowing rhetoric, abundance of illustrations, witty points, 
brilliant ideas. From the first he filled the church. Merchants 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. IJJ 

told their customers of the talented young preacher, and they 
would come miles to hear him. He was annoyed at interrup- 
tions, and when late-comers appeared he would stop speaking till 
they were seated. 

" His personal habits were as original and effective as his pul- 
pit efforts. He was not what would be called a good pastor. An 
old pastor of the Methodist Episcopal church in Lawrenceburg 
said to me : ' Mr. Beecher could outpreach me, but I could out- 
visit him, and visiting builds up a church more than preaching.' 
The records of the church during his pastorate are yet in our 
hands, though in one of the great floods here the volume floated 
out of the submerged study of the pastor, and was found, by 
chance, embedded in the yellow deposit of the Ohio. It is accu- 
rately and neatly kept, in the beautiful hand of Air. Beecher, each 
entry signed with his well-known autograph. The additions to 
the church were about on the average of other pastors. 

" But outside of strictly pastoral work Mr. Beecher's influ- 
ence was felt widely and beneficially. He w r as universally popu- 
lar. He was kindly, genial, and free with all classes. He would 
hunt and fish with men not used to the society of clergymen, and 
spent much time on the river, especially in catching drift-wood 
brought down in every rise. Once he called to a poor German 
emigrant woman that if she would bring him her clothes-line he 
would show her how to get her winter's supply of fuel. She 
brought it, and he tied a stone to one end, and, flinging it out 
from the shore over logs, would draw them in. In a little while 
their combined efforts had brought in a dray-load. 

" He was fond of talking with all sorts and conditions of men. 
There was an old shoemaker in the town of pronounced infidel 
views. Mr. Beecher would spend hours in the room where he 
worked, discussing with him. 

" There is no evidence that he lowered in any degree his char- 
acter as a Gospel minister, but plenty that his influence was felt 
by the neglected classes, and even by the rough elements. And in 
this did he not follow the example of his divine Master, of whom 
it was said : ' This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them ' ? 

" He was not unscholarly, but is remembered as a reader 
rather than as a student. He studied men even more than books. 
A Baptist minister with whom he had a discussion one Sunday 
is yet living here, and has told me that at the close of the discus- 



I J$ BIOGRAPHY OF 

sion, in which the Baptist minister thought he had the best of it, 
Mr. Beecher waved his hand and said to the audience : ' Well, I 
don't care if you all go down to the river and get immersed.' 

" His going away was esteemed a great loss. - Cords of peo- 
ple,' says an old lady graphically, ' were about to come into the 
Church.' But Indianapolis, then with only 2,500 people, was the 
State capital, and was rapidly outstripping the little town on the 
river. It was a louder call. 

" Mr. Beecher's relations with the other ministers were happy, 
although he outshone them completely. He established a popu- 
lar union Sunday-school, notwithstanding there was one in each 
church, and he often spoke in other churches." 

Mr. Beecher described his preaching there as follows : 

" I preached some theology. I had just come out of the 
Seminary, and retained some portions of systematic theology, 
which I used when I had nothing else ; and as a man chops straw 
and mixes it with Indian meal in order to distend the stomach of 
the ox that eats it, so I chopped a little of the regular orthodox 
theology, that I might sprinkle it with the meal of the Lord Jesus 
Christ. But my horizon grew larger and larger in that one idea 
of Christ. It seems to me that first I saw Christ as the Star of 
Bethlehem, but afterward He seemed to expand, and I saw about 
a quarter of the horizon filled with His light, and through years it 
came around so that I saw about one-half in that light ; and it 
was not until after I had gone through two or three revivals of 
religion that, when I looked around, He was all and in all. And 
my whole ministry sprang out of that." 

At another time he said : 

" I had no idea that I could preach. I never expected that I 
could accomplish much. I merely went to work with the feeling : 
' I will do as well as I can, and I will stick to it, if the Lord 
pleases, and fight His battle the best way I know how.' And I 
was thankful as I could be. Nobody ever sent me a spare-rib 
that I did not thank God for the kindness which was shown me. 

I recollect when Judge gave me his cast-off clothing I felt 

that I was sumptuously clothed. I wore old coats and second- 
hand shirts for two or three years, and I was not above it either, 
although sometimes, as I was physically a somewhat well-devel- 
oped man, and the judge was thin and his legs were slim, they 
were rather a tight fit. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. \ J 9 

" There was a humorous side to this, but I could easily have 
put a dolorous side to it. I could have said : ' Humph ! pretty 
business ! Son of Lyman Beecher, president of a theological 
seminary, in this miserable hole, where there is no church, and 
where there are no elders and no men to make them out of ! 
This is not according to my deserts. I could do better. I ought 
not to waste iny talents in such a place.' But I was delivered 
from any such feeling. I felt that it was an unspeakable privi- 
lege to be anywhere and speak of Christ. I had very little theo- 
logy — that is to say, it slipped away from me. I knew it, but it 
did not do me any good. It was like an armor which had lost its 
buckles and would not stick on. But I had one vivid point — 
the realization of the love of God in Christ Jesus. And I tried 
to work that up in every possible shape for my people. And it 
was the secret of all the little success which I had in the early 
part of my ministry. I remember that I. used to ride out in the 
neighborhood and preach to the destitute, and that my predomi- 
nant feeling was thanksgiving that God had permitted me to 
preach the unsearchable riches of His grace. I think I can say 
that during the first ten years of my ministerial life I was in that 
spirit." 

Here he began a habit which he followed during the first ten 
years of his ministry — that of keeping a record of every sermon 
preached, stating the date, text, an outline of the sermon, and 
then the reasons why he preached that particular sermon, " as 
giving a kind of guide to my course by a perusal of what I have 
done, also to avoid repetition and to show why I made given ser- 
mons " ; thus forming the habit of preparing his sermons with a 
view to reaching some specific object. This record, with his 
daily journal in which he jotted down such ihoughts on religious 
subjects as came to his mind day by day, are now before us, 
and show an immense amount of painstaking care. His habit of 
careful analysis was of incalculable value to him later, giving a 
logical method to his reasoning. It was not until after he came 
to Brooklyn that, under the increased pressure of this larger 
field of work, he abandoned this habit. 

The last recorded sermons we find were those preached on 
the morning and evening of January 5, 1848. 

During the second year of his Lawrenceburg pastorate he 
received a call to the Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapo- 



l8o REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

lis, at a salary of $600 per year. Though this opened up a much 
larger and more effective field of labor, with the means of living 
much more comfortably, yet, feeling that he was doing effective 
work where he was, he refused the call. He was always opposed 
to short pastorates and frequent changes : he had no faith in roll- 
ing stones. 

After a short time the call was repeated and again declined. 
He was then urged to reconsider his refusal, and strong repre- 
sentations were made to him that it was his duty to accept the 
larger and more important field. At last, perplexed, he agreed to 
lay the matter before the Synod and abide by their recommenda- 
tion, The Synod advised that he accept the call. 

Aside from the strong aversion which he felt for restless 
changes, and the feeling that, no matter how humble the field 
might be, he ought to labor there so long as there was work for 
the Master to engage him, he also felt a great unwillingness to 
leave the people to whom he was becoming strongly attached. 
The life there, though rude and simple, had been very happy. 
There his first child had been born. There for the first time he 
really had begun to live and work in the field he had chosen. 
But as he felt constrained to be guided by the advice which he 
had sought, on the Synod's recommendation he accepted the call. 

On the afternoon of July 28, 1839, he preached his farewell 
sermon at Lawrenceburg from the text : " These are the words 
which I spake unto you while I w y as yet with you." 



CHAPTER X. 

The New Field — Growth of Influence — Social Life — The Secret of Effective 
Preaching — Editorial Labors — Lectures to Young Men — Call to Brook- 
lyn — Departure. 

WITH a heart full of tender feelings he parted with his peo- 
ple and entered into the larger work in which he first 
became known outside of the limits of his Presbytery. 

In the last week in July, 1839, he removed his family to 
Indianapolis, which, though it was the State capital, was hardly 
more than a village, having less than 4,000 inhabitants, its 
streets unpaved and noted for the depth and persistency of the 
mud. Like most of the then frontier towns, it was very malarial : 
chills and fever were expected as a matter of course, very rarely 
disappointing the expectation. 

The Second Presbyterian Church was an offshoot from the 
"" First " Church, a chip struck out by the axe of controversy, 
then being so fiercely waged between the Old and New Schools. 
The new church was of course New School. Its fifteen origi- 
nal members, having been released from the First Church after 
some little ecclesiastical difficulty, organized at once, and secured 
the second story of the old Marion County Seminary. 

Their first call was to Rev. S. Holmes, of New Bedford, 
Mass.; he declined. They then invited Rev. John C. Young, of 
Danville, Ky., with like result. Their next call was to Henry 
Ward Beecher, who became their first pastor. He was then but 
twenty-six, looking still young, but fresh, rugged, and full of life. 

To the few survivors of that little band who knew and loved 
him in those early days we are largely indebted for the impres- 
sion produced by his preaching in this church and in the com- 
munity, and for a brief account of his life among them. 

" My first recollection of Mr. Beecher," said one of his early 
parishioners, "was when I was a journeyman printer. A man 
named King came to me and, with much enthusiasm, declared he 
had heard the greatest preacher he had ever listened to in his 



1 8 2 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

life — a young fellow who was preaching at the Marion County- 
Seminary. 

" I went there and heard him for the first time in the spring of 
1840, 1 suppose it was. I was, like everybody else, perfectly car- 
ried away with him. I soon formed his acquaintance, and, after 
he got to the new church on the Circle, became a member in the 
great revival of 1842. I was a printer when he delivered those 
lectures to young men, and in the course of printing them (I was 
at work in the shop where they were published) I was much in 
contact with him. They were published by the old jobbing 
house of E. Chamberlain, who was afterwards a bookseller here. 
The Indiana Farmer was printed in the office where I worked,, 
published by a Quaker named Willis. Mr. Beecher was really the 
life and soul of it — wrote all the articles in it that were good for 
anything. I frequently assisted him in reading proofs. He had 
no practical experience as an agriculturist, except that he was 
thoroughly alive to every new thing. He took great pride in rais- 
ing flowers, and his garden was full of plants that had never 
been seen here before. During his revival meetings — I think as. 
much to test my sincerity and earnestness as anything else — he 
invited me to come to his house at five o'clock in the morning 
and breakfast with him. It was a winter morning and before day- 
light. Mrs. Beecher and the children were up, everything in per- 
fect order, and breakfast ready. He called his wife and children 
together for family worship, and spoke and prayed in simple 
words. It seemed to me the most beautiful and touching thing I 
ever saw in my life. Mr. Beecher, I thought, was even then 
broad in his ideas and the most industrious man I ever knew. 
For a time he lived in one side of a little one-story house in the 
alley half a square north of Washington Street, between East and 
New Jersey Streets, in the rear of where the Jewish Synagogue 
now stands. I think there were three rooms. At another time 
he occupied a house that stood near the southeast corner of 
Pennsylvania and New York Streets. He has told me that dur- 
ing a malarial season he preached when he could hardly stand 
up, and, making his way home, would, on entering his door, fall 
from exhaustion." 

Another writing to us says : 

" I remember well the occasion of his advent here (from 
Lawrenceburg). Almost immediately his ministry attracted a 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. I 83 

strong following — quite too numerous and influential for the 
limited seating capacity of one hundred and fifty the chapel could 
accommodate, and a church was erected for him on the corner 
of Market and Circle Streets. That was probably in 1840. The 
building was regarded as a colossal edifice, and, while what 
would now be considered primitive in the extreme, was in the 
main comfortable and inviting. It was the first departure from 
the orthodox style of high pulpits, and contained a low desk 
and platform. From the first his preaching and precept were of 
the beauty of holiness and praise, gladness and thanksgiving, 
and to this end he added the attraction of music to the service of 
lesson and prayer. In those days his choir was considered mag- 
nificent, and what the organ might lack in volume was more than 
made up in melody and soul-reaching timbre. He was especial- 
ly happy in the selection of music that seemed to be an accom- 
paniment to his discourse. He was also the first clergyman, out 
of the Episcopal Church, to introduce chants in the service. 

" Upon the opposite side of The Circle from his church, fac- 
ing west, was located the First Presbyterian Church, the Rev. 
Phineas D. Gurley, pastor. I have often heard them spoken of 
as the ' two distinguished divines ' who were ' the wheel-horses 
among theologians.' They were both leaders. I think that if 
there was one impression more than another conveyed by Mr. 
Beecher's appearance it was that of reserve force. The steam 
up, he was capable and eager for the work in hand. Indeed, he 
seemed the very personification of energy. I recall, however, 
that he was always neatly dressed, usually in black, and that he 
was the first clergyman in this part of the country to wear a soft 
hat. I am not sure if he did not wear the first straw hat in those 
days of clerical conventionality. He was certainly devoted to 
comfort, if in no manner given to taking his ease. I doubt if he 
knew what it was to be idle. When apparently indulging in re- 
creation his active mind was storing food for thought and spir- 
itual teaching. The lightest romance which caught his fancy (for 
he was an omnivorous reader) furnished material for practical 
application. 

" In form he was compactly built, with just enough flesh to 
give grace to his lithe and active movements. His step was par- 
ticularly elastic and yet firm. All vigor and animation, there 
was the rosy tint of health in his complexion, and his eyes were 



184 BIOGRAPHY OF 

as clear and bright as a child's. His disposition was sunny, and 
the kindly grasp of his hand confirmed the charm of his genial 
presence. It followed that he was fond of young people and fre- 
quently participated in their romps and sports. I remember in a 
game of Copenhagen at a church picnic he was in no way dis- 
concerted by being rolled over and over down the hill when 
entangled in the rope. 

" When need be he could be determined enough. At one 
time a younger brother was an inmate of his family, and was a 
classmate of mine at the University. In the boy's judgment ' all 
work and no play made Jack a dull boy,' and he went fishing and 
was gone two days. Instead of whetting his appetite for study 
the diversion had the opposite effect, and he openly declared he 
would go to school no more. Mr. Beecher did not waste words 
on the matter, but seized him and took him by main force. As 
they drew near the University the lad broke loose and took to his 
heels, Mr. Beecher after him. The mud in our streets at that 
day was something phenomenal, and there was a tussle in it, 
when the two closed, that sent the ■ soft impeachment ' in every 
direction. For a little while the air was filled with mud ; arms 
and legs were scarcely distinguishable. The authority of elder 
brother prevailed, carrying its point — and the younger brother, 
too — and handed him over to the tender mercies of the principal, 
Mr. Kemper, who was a rigid disciplinarian, and proverbial for 
observing the Scriptural injunction of not sparing the rod. The 
youth was equal to the occasion, however. Equipped in extra 
thickness of clothing, he took his punishment with most astonish- 
ing fortitude, much to the admiration of the other boys, whose 
sympathies were naturally enlisted. 

" This incident illustrated Mr. Beecher's indifference to ap- 
pearances where a duty was involved. He also assisted in build- 
ing, painting, and varnishing his house, and, if material fell short 
or heavy groceries were needed, did not hesitate to go after them 
with his wheelbarrow and take them home. In the single par- 
ticular of giving dignity to labor, if there had been no other, his 
influence in the community was invaluable. 

" As in a notice of his personnel his characteristics first at- 
tract attention, so in his ministerial labors his method of con- 
version came before the inculcation of doctrine. 

" I have spoken of his fondness for young men. It was re- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 185 

ciprocated to a degree amounting to championship. His influ- 
ence was personal and direct. In his revival work he did not 
trust entirely to church service. He became personally ac- 
quainted with people. He had a habit of taking long strolls 
with men, and what his precept failed in his good companionship 
made up. One long walk generally captured the sinner. 

" He did not confine himself to Bible preachments. I heard 
his lectures to young men in the basement of the church, and 
they were so practical that they reached every mind. He struck 
yeoman blows at the evils of intemperance, and engaged in a con- 
troversy with an influential distiller of Lawrenceburg that at- 
tracted much attention and was reported by the press of that 
date. Largely owing to the sentiment aroused by the debate, no 
doubt, the distiller abandoned his calling. 

" He also engaged in the publication of an agricultural paper, 
the Indiana Farmer, and, as far as known, was the only profes- 
sional man who ever put practical sense into a periodical of the 
sort. A keen lover of nature, he may be said to have put his 
heart in the work and made it a memorable success. 

" I do not remember his making any political speeches, al- 
though it is well known that his church was the favorite resort of 
statesmen, who made a study of his oratory and diction for their 
own benefit. I know that he was deeply interested in all chari- 
table enterprises, particularly the benevolent institutions that are 
now the pride of the State. 

" Nor am I aware that he ever addressed the legislative 
bodies in particular, although the General Assembly men attended 
his church almost in a body. He was known as a Whig, but was 
not pronounced in that direction. 

" The heart-felt interest he took in the slavery question was 
well known. About the year 1842 a roving commission of Aboli- 
tionists from the East visited Indianapolis. They held a meeting 
on the State House grounds, and I remember seeing Mr. Beecher 
a prominent figure on the platform. 

"The unpopularity of the Abolition cause at that time cannot 
easily be imagined. To be identified with it was to be socially 
ostracized and boycotted generally. It required the courage of a 
martyr to be an Abolitionist. As notable examples may be cited 
two physicians who were members of Mr. Beecher's church. Bold 
enough to avow their principles, they were exceedingly unpopu- 



1 8 6 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

lar with the masses, and in their struggle to combat popular opin- 
ion found it extremely difficult to support themselves and fami- 
lies. They literally had no practice. The manner in which Mr. 
Beecher sustained himself on this question was prophetic of the 
personal hold he had upon men. It was exceptional. 

" Meanwhile his popularity both as a preacher and man con- 
tinued to increase. Indeed, his success was without precedent 
and has never been rivalled since. His church was crowded 
every Sabbath, both by his own congregation and visitors from 
other and distant churches. Although the pew system obtained, 
.at least one-fourth of the seats (one entire section) was reserved 
for young men and strangers. Among them may be named the 
judges of the Supreme, Federal, and local courts; distinguished 
professional men ; and if there was a Hugh Miller of a fellow, 
picking out truths of humanity from stone or devoting himself 
like the Owens to his fellow-man, he would be found in that im- 
posing body of men. I suppose Indianapolis could not then boast 
of more than five thousand inhabitants, but there was an unusual 
aggregate of culture and refinement, and it was pretty sure to 
find delight in Mr. Beecher's preaching and service. 

" As a rule his morning sermons were more doctrinal and 
more confined to notes than his evening discourse. In the de- 
livery of all of his sermons, however, he would at times become 
very much enthused and dramatic. 

" One frequent gesture that I noticed in attending his last 
lecture here he retained through life. It was the habit of raising 
his right hand high in air, and after a pause, sometimes prolonged, 
bringing his arm down sharply to his side. An amusing incident 
once occurred in consequence. At the identical moment that 
his hand was raised a big, burly fellow, a member of his congre- 
gation, aroused from a nap (even his eloquence could not keep 
every man awake) and seeing the hand uplifted, the sleepy lout 
thought the benediction was being pronounced. He gathered 
himself up accordingly and marched toward the door, making a 
terrible racket with his squeaking boots, to the visible annoyance 
of the congregation." There was a charming twinkle of fun in 
the preacher's eye as he gravely said: 'If others of the congre- 
gation desire to leave I will wait.' A, laugh went round the 
audience. 

"In his liberal interpretation of the divine calling of bringing 



RE V. HENR Y WA RD BEE CHER. \ 8 y 

sinners to repentance, some motley members, not to say black 
sheep, were gathered into the fold. Among these was a lame 
tailor who was a very hard case indeed, but was possessed of an 
appreciative soul and a wonderfully retentive memory. He was. 
always to be found in his seat in church and was attentive 
enough to inspire a speaker. The following morning the tailor's 
shop would be crowded to hear him repeat the sermon, or elo- 
quent passages thereof. This he would do, word for word, and 
with a close imitation of voice and gesture that proved a first- 
class actor had been lost to the world in the realm of ' the shears ' 
and 'goose.' A propensity for gambling that could not be 
checked was reported to the church and he was dropped from 
the roll. 

" Take them all in all, Mr. Beecher's sermons in Indianapolis 
were marvels of logic and learning, graced by rare beauty of ex- 
pression and that feeling to nature kin which touched the heart. 
His usefulness could not be circumscribed by the then narrow 
limits. His fame spread abroad in the land, and one fine 
Sunday two or more strangers, with an unmistakable New York 
air, appeared in the church. It transpired that they were a visit- 
ing committee in search of a bright and shining pulpit light, and 
it all ended in his call to Brooklyn. 

"Great were the regrets of his congregation and the com- 
munity of which he was the great central figure of interest and 
influence. The impress he left has not been obliterated, with 
the growth of the city, by the lapse of time. In many respects 
the city is a monument to his earnest efforts to promote her mo- 
ral and intellectual development." 

Mr. Beecher has often remarked in later years that his first 
real preaching was at Indianapolis. Although at Lawrenceburg 
he was noted for his brilliancy of diction and wonderful oratori- 
cal power, and by his good-fellowship and the strong personal 
interest which he took in all his people made many and lasting 
friends, yet he did not feel that he was doing real, effective 
work. " I can preach so as to make the people come to hear 
me," said he to good old Bishop Little, " but somehow I can't 
preach them clear into the kingdom." 

A year or two after his removal to Indianapolis he deter- 
mined to find out what the difficulty was. 

" We had delivered hundreds before, but until then the ser- 



1 88 BIOGRAPHY OF 

mon was the end and not the means. We had a vague idea that 
truth was to be preached, and then it was to be left to do its 
work under God's blessing as best it might. The result was not 
satisfying. Why should not preaching do now what it did in the 
Apostles' days ? Why should it be a random and unrequited 
effort ? These thoughts grew, and the want of fruits was so pain- 
ful that we determined to make a careful examination of the 
Apostles' teaching, to see what made it so immediately efficient. 
We found that they laid a foundation first of historical truth 
common to them and their auditors ; that this mass of familiar- 
truth was then concentrated upon the hearers in the form of an 
intense personal application and appeal ; that the language was 
not philosophical and scholastic, but the language of common 
life. We determined to try the same. We considered what moral 
truths were admitted by everybody and gathered many of them 
together. We considered how they could be so combined as 
to press men toward a religious state. We recalled to mind 
the character and condition of many, who, we knew, would be 
present, and then, after as earnest a prayer as we ever offered, 
and with trembling solicitude, we went to the academy and 
preached the new sermon. The Lord gave it power, and ten or 
twelve persons were aroused by it and led ultimately to a reli- 
gious life. 

"This was the most memorable day of our ministerial life. 
The idea was born. Preaching was a definite and practical 
thing. Our people needed certain moral changes. Preaching 
was only a method of enforcing truths, not for the sake of the 
truths themselves, but for the results to be sought in men. Man 
was the thing. Henceforth our business was to work upon man ; 
to study him, to stimulate and educate him. A sermon was good 
that had power on the heart, and was good for nothing, no matter 
how good, that had no moral power on man. Others had learned 
this. It was the secret of success in every man who ever was 
eminent for usefulness in preaching. But no man can inherit 
experience. It must be born in each man for himself. After 
the light dawned I could then see how plainly Jonathan Ed- 
wards's sermons were so made. Those gigantic applications of 
his were only the stretching out of the arms of the sermon upon 
the lives and hearts of his audience. I could see it now, and 
wondered that I had not seen it before." 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. I 89 

The application of this, to him, new idea soon began to be 
apparent in rich results. 

A series of revivals sprang up, by which many were brought 
into the church. ■ From one of his successors we learn that 
" these were great foundation days for the church. Strong re- 
ligious impressions were made upon the young town, and very 
many were redeemed to a life of Christian service. These were 
fruitful years, starred over by three prolific revivals. In the 
spring of 1842 nearly one hundred were received ; again, in 1843, 
was another spiritual blessing, and once more in 1845. Such 
fruits vindicate the character and fervor of the pastoral activity. 
Many of these converts are in the church to-day, old men, testi- 
fying as elders and devout believers to the genuineness of this 
work. Mr. Beecher preached seventy nights in succession dur- 
ing one spring, in labors abundant. He ceased special effort, he 
said, to permit many who did not wish to come out under an ex- 
citement, to calmly join the church. 

" Revivals have been characteristic of this church from the 
beginning. They have brought it steady and growing and effi- 
cient workers." 

He wrote to his father May 1, 1842 : 

" Prosperity and peace dwell with us. Our church is filled ; 
our young converts run well, and already there is gathered in 
material for another revival of persons hitherto not wont to 
attend church anywhere. 

" I hope this fall and early winter to see the scenes of this 
spring renewed. The -neighborhoods about town are also re- 
vived." 

He has told us of one occasion when he attended a meeting 
of the Presbytery with his father. Great efforts were made at 
these meetings to awaken a religious interest among the people 
especially in the church where the meetings were held. Several 
sermons had been delivered on this occasion, with no great effect, 
when he was called upon to preach. He selected for his subject 
' The Parable of the Prodigal Son." " As I went on describing 
the going away of the sinner from God the people became inte- 
rested ; as I described"the sinner's coming to himself the interest 
increased ; but when I came to the return of the sinner to God, 
and God's readiness, even hastening, to receive him, the whole 
audience broke down, and father, who was on the platform with 



I9O BIOGRAPHY OF 

me, said, wiping his eyes and spectacles, ' Thank the Lord ! a 

revival is begun.' Mr. C , a good brother, grasped my hand 

after the sermon with great fervor. ' You did well, Beecher, you 
did well ; but you ought to have given 'em salt instead of sugar.' 
But since the salt had been tried several days without effect, and 
the sugar, as he called my preaching, brought many to Christ, 
I did not agree with him." 

His zealous labors were by no means confined to Indianapolis 
He was constantly called to help in the towns and villages 
throughout the centre of the State. One, two, and even three 
weeks at a time he would be gone, laboring to help some brother 
striving to awaken his people. 

Terre Haute, Madison, Greenwood, Greencastle, Lafayette, 
Logansport, Fort Wayne, Laporte, and Columbus are the names 
we find most frequently endorsed on the manuscript notes of his 
old revival sermons now before us. These were the days he 
loved to look back upon ; though full of hardship, privations, and 
not a little suffering, they were also full of that great joy which 
comes to those who labor successfully in winning souls. 

Revisiting Terre Haute in one of his lecture tours many 
years afterward, and for the first time after coming East, he writes 
back : 

"And now my face is turned homeward ! I am bound to 
Terre Haute — clear across the prairie that I once traversed in 
early days. Farm touches farm over these wide expanses which, 
forty years ago, I thought could never be inhabited ! No coal, 
no timber — how, except along the streams, could men settle and 
thrive ? Railroads, those dry and solid rivers, have solved the 
problem. 

" Is this Terre Haute ? How has thy prosperity increased 
and thy beauty diminished ! 

"I wandered up and down the streets to find my Terre Haute! 
It was gone, covered up, lost, utterly lost, in new streets, new 
buildings ! Where is the former green ? Where the quiet fields 
within bowshot of the town ? 

"At any rate, -I shall know the church. There it was that I 
first wrought in revivals, and every board and nail in it was pre- 
cious. I found it. I entered by the basement side-door and 
stood in the lecture-room where I preached my first sermon, the 
same day of my arrival in town, to aid Rev. Dr. Jewett. It was 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



I 9 I 



a solemn feeling that stole over me. I saw the audience again. 
The seats were filled with shadowy listeners ! It only needed to 
see a few of the familiar faces — L. H. Scott, Dr. Ketcham, Ball, 
Gookin, and others — to make it real again ! Just then came up 
the aisle Harry Ross himself ! It was the touch needed to round 
out the reminiscence. Only one fact disturbed the sweet illusion. 
This was not the san\e church. The old one had been burned, 
and this one took its place ! It was a gentle shock to my sensi- 
bilities. But it stood on the very ground, and was on the old 
foundations, and upon the same plan, and looked like the old 
one, and so I inwardly voted that it was the old one and took my 
comfort of it ! The city is wonderfully improved in every way 
except to those sentimentalists who come hither to renew the 
past and live over again old experiences. 

" After the lecture, in a special train, we sped, through dark- 
ness and storm, to Indianapolis— three hours' blessed ride. How 
different this midnight ride from the first one, thirty-five years 
before ! For three weeks I had labored side by side with Bro- 
ther Jewett — the first revival in which I had ever taken part ! 
How helpless and wretched did I feel when Jewett sent for me — 
then newly settled in Indianapolis — to come over and help him ! 
I had no effective sermons. I did not know how to preach in a 
revival. Yet my elders said, Go. I rode two days the lonely 
road, through beech forests (now all gone), in a dazed and won- 
dering state. Hardly was my saddle empty before Jewett was at 
my elbow. 'You have done well to come. You must preach to- 
night.' In a moment the cloud lifted. The reluctance was 
gone. It has been so all my life. At a distance I dread and 
brood and shrink from any weighty enterprise ; but the moment 
the occasion arrives joy shines clear, and an eager appetite to 
dash into the battle comes. 

" Three memorable weeks at a time when events stamp the 
memory and the heart as the die stamps the coin ! When the 
time came to return home did ever heart swell with stronger and 
more unutterable feeling ? To go back to the ordinary round of 
church life from this glowing centre seemed so intolerable that 
my whole nature and all my soul rose up in uncontrollable pray- 
er. Through the beech woods, sometimes crying, sometimes 
singing, and always praying, I rode in one long controversy with 
God. ' Slay me if Thou wilt, but do not send me home to bar- 



ig2 BIOGRAPHY OF 

renness. Thou shalt go with me. I will not be refused. I am 
not afraid of Thee ! I will prevail or die ! ' — these and even 
wilder strains went through the soul. 

" At length the clouds rolled away. The heavens had never 
seemed so beautiful and radiant. An unspeakable peace and 
confidence filled my soul. The assurance of victory was perfect, 
and tranquillity blossomed into joy at every step. The first day 
was one long struggle of prayer. The secotid day was one long 
ecstasy of joy and thanksgiving ! I need not say to the wise that 
the fire of my heart kindled in the church, and for months the 
genial warmth brought forth a spiritual summer, so that flowers 
and fruit abounded in the garden of the Lord. 

" And now in this three-hour midnight ride, amid outward 
storms but inward joy and thanksgiving, I recalled the old days, 
and mingled their light with the gladness of the passing hour." 

Referring to a revival at Terre Haute — perhaps the one just 
mentioned — Dr. Lyman Beecher wrote : 

" The revival here under Henry's administration and preach- 
ing was, in the adaptation of means and happy results, one of the 
most perfectly conducted and delightful that I have ever 
known." 

We can get some slight idea of the hard physical labor he 
endured in his ordinary home preaching by quoting a single page 
of his " Sermon Record Book " — a not unusual record : 

" Oct. 22. Rode 36 miles ; Adams' neighborhood by noon. Eve- 
ning rode five miles to Franklin ; preached on Faith. 

" 23. Rode back to Adams, and at 10}^ preached ordination 
of Stimson : Duties of Pastor. 

" 24. Sunday morning and evening, our church. 

" 26. Funeral of Mrs. Jennison. 

" 31. Twice — once on Baptism. 
Nov. 7. Morning, baptism ; p.m., funeral. 

" 11. Rode 8 miles to Brewer's and preached ; home again. 

' 12. Rode 8 miles to N. Prov. Ch.; preached, and home. 

" 13. Preached morning and night, and rode 5 miles to M ; 

p.m., 10 miles, preached 3 times a day." 

At this time he undertook a minute and careful analysis of 
the Gospels : 

" I took the New Testament, I read it diligently, I made my- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 193 

self familiar with the life and teachings of Christ, I became satu- 
rated with the spirit of the four Gospels, I obtained all the helps 
I could get for their interpretation, and I have now in my drawer 
a heap of manuscripts in which I have condensed and compiled 
these Gospels, everything in them being conveniently arranged 
for use. It was an immense work. These four Gospels had, as 
it were, been eaten and digested by me and gone into my blood 
and bones. 

" It was while I was engaged in this work that Christ was 
brought to my soul for the first time in my life with a sweetness 
and beauty, with a vividness and glory, that for the time trans- 
formed the heavens and the earth to my eyes. I had a concep- 
tion of the depths of the nature of the Divine Being that made 
metaphysical doctrines and philosophical formulas more repug- 
nant to me than they had ever been before, and I entered into a 
vow and covenant that if I were permitted to preach I would 
know nothing but Christ and Him crucified among His people. 
I took my horse and saddle-bags and traversed the wilderness of 
Indiana, keeping that view in my mind. For eight or ten years 
I labored for the poor and needy, in cabins, in camp meetings, 
through woods, up and down, sometimes riding two days to 
meet my appointments. I had no books but my Bible, and I 
went from one to the other — from the Bible to men, and from 
men to the Bible. When a case came up I said to myself : 
' What will reach that case ? ' and I looked through the Acts of 
the Apostles to see how they reached such cases. I hunted the 
Bible through in order to get at the right way. So I worked on, 
and at last the habit was formed in my mind of studying men, 
their dispositions, their wants, their peculiarities ; and then I 
w r orked with reference to curing them, not constructing a system, 
but striving to produce righteousness in the individual and in 
communities." 

It is said that in his preaching he often went double-loaded. 
He would go to church with a sermon specially prepared for 
some person whom he greatly desired to reach. If, however, he 
was not present, he would preach a more general sermon. But 
when, on some other occasion, he found, on entering church, that 
the object of his solicitude was present, he would lay aside the 
sermon prepared for that day and preach the special one. 

It often occasioned no little surprise in the mind of the sub- 



1 94 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

ject that Mr. Beecher should have happened that day to preach a 
sermon so exactly fitted to his case. 

Although he had the strongest feelings of love and kindliness 
toward mankind, both in the abstract and the concrete, yet he 
never hesitated to lash with stinging words any who took advan- 
tage of their strength to abuse another's weakness. And in such 
a case nothing could induce him to back down or withdraw from 
the attack, unless he could be satisfied that he had been mistaken 
in his facts. 

One noticeable incident of the kind occurred during his min- 
istry in Indianapolis, as narrated by Mrs. Beecher : 

A man in the city hotel, and not a little feared because of his 
brutality, had done something more brutal than usual, and, the 
facts coming to Mr. Beecher's knowledge, in his sermon on the 
following Sunday he expressed in no gentle terms his abhorrence 
of the act, and in very strong language rebuked the man. 

Many of his listeners were alarmed lest the man would, when 
he heard of the sermon, do Mr. Beecher some injury. 

Of course before the day was over the substance in the ser- 
mon had been reported throughout the town, and did not fail to 
reach the man's ears. 

Monday morning Mr. Beecher went to the post-office imme- 
diately after breakfast, and must go right by the hotel around 
which this man would most likely be hanging. He got his mail 
and turned to come home. As he passed the hotel there were sev- 
eral standing by, evidently watching for some development. At 
that moment the man came down the steps with a pistol in his hand. 

" Did you say thus and so in your sermon yesterday ?" 

"I did." 

" Did you intend those remarks for me, or were you mean- 
ing me ? " 

" I most certainly did." 

" Then take it back right here, or by I'll shoot you on 

the spot." 

" Shoot away," was the reply, as, looking the ruffian sternly 
in the face, Mr. Beecher calmly, with deliberate step, walked past 
the man. With pointed pistol and fierce oaths the man followed 
for a few paces, when, baffled by the imperturbable coolness of 
his opponent, he slunk away down a side-street, ashamed to re- 
turn to the hotel. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



195 



Mr. Beecher himself has given us an account of another simi- 
lar event : 

" I remember that in Indianapolis there was a meeting called ^ 
for the enforcement of the laws against gamblers and against 
grog-selling, at which I was requested to address mechanics and 
laborers ; and some of these violators of the law were there. A 
man named Bishop, and others of that stamp, were in the meet- 
ing to hear what was going to be said. They were the very men 
that we were aiming at. I was much excited. There were gam- 
bling-dens and liquor-saloons where young men were induced to 
drink and form bad habits, and were in danger of being dragged 
down to destruction ; and I expressed myself plainly, and point- 
ed to Bishop, who sat on a back seat, and denounced him to his 
face. There was a lively time, if I recollect right ; and he gave 
out the next day that when he and I met one or the other of us 
was going to be whipped. I went down the street soon after, and 
I had forgotten all about it until I was right in front of his shop. 
He was a bully. He watched me as I came down, and I con- 
fess that my first thought was a wish that I was not there ; but 
then it would never do for me to flinch, and I walked as though 
I did not see him till I came close to him, when I turned and 
looked at him. He thought I was going to attack him, and wait- 
ed a moment ; I bowed and said, ' Good-morning, Mr. Bishop,' 
and passed on. He would not run after me and hit me, and so 
the affair blew over. 

"A year or two after that I left Indianapolis and went up the 
river, and he chanced to be on the boat with me ; and there 
never was a man that paid me more kind attention than he did. 
He looked after my children here and there, guarded me at night, 
and wanted me to drink with him — some soda-water. He opened 
his whole heart to me, and told me how he felt at the time of 
my remarks, how he felt the next day, and how he had come 
to feel since. He said he knew he was carrying on a wicked 
trade, that he was mad with himself, and that he was mad with 
me, and told me what it was that induced him to stop. I 
found that under his love of gain, which had led him to sell 
liquor, there was a conscience, a heart, and a good deal of 
kindness." 

During the latter part of his ministry in Indianapolis the 
Presbyterian clergymen had been requested by the presbytery to 



^ 



I96 BIOGRAPHY OF 

preach at least one sermon during the year on slavery. Agree- 
ably to this suggestion Mr. Beecher prepared three sermons on 
this subject. He waited until the United States Federal Court 
came there, with Judge McLean as the presiding judge ; and 
when all of the State courts, Supreme Court and Circuit, were in 
session and the Legislature was convened — so that all lawyers 
and public officers, men of every kind, thronged the city — he an- 
nounced that he should preach on slavery. 

From the original manuscript before us we learn that he pre- 
sented his subject in three sermons. In the first he discussed 
ancient slavery, especially among the Hebrews, its origin, meth- 
ods, and final abandonment. In his second he presented "the 
doctrine and practice of the New Testament in respect to 
4 slavery." 

In his last he discussed the moral aspects of slavery and its 
effect upon the community. These sermons made a profound 
impression on the public mind. Indiana was just over the bor- 
der of slaveland, and many of its people sympathized heartily 
with the slave-holders. The prevailing sentiment was very bitter 
against the Abolitionists. There was very little patience with 
such " cranks " and "fanatics." So when Mr. Beecher attacked 
slavery with the same unsparing earnestness which characterized 
his utterances on this subject in latter days — for he did not hesi- 
tate to denounce it as a crime against God and man — he stirred 
up a very large and very energetic hornet's nest. The city was all 
excitement. Men talked of nothing else. The friends of slavery 
were bitter and threatening ; the few friends of freedom, overawed 
by the threatening demonstrations, held their peace and waited 
to see the outcome. Mr. Beecher stood almost alone. Many of 
the church-brethren were shocked and grieved beyond all ex- 
pression ; some even felt so outraged as to send for letters of 
dismissal. Many prophesied that he had destroyed himself and 
ended his influence for usefulness for ever, mourning over his 
speedy downfall — a mournful prophecy so often repeated in 
after-years by timid brothers" whenever he took any advanced 
position, and with the same results as in this instance. 

Holding the United States Circuit, then in session, was Judge 
McLean, of the United States Supreme Court, whose views upon 
all public questions were naturally held in high esteem. The 
hotel where he was stopping was full of lawyers and members of 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. igj 

the Legislature. On the Monday morning after these sermons, in 
angry and excited groups, they stood in the public rooms of the 
hotel, talking about the three sermons which had thrown the town 
into such a ferment. The judge, happening to join one of these 
groups, was asked his opinion. Instead of denouncing Mr. 
Beecher's bold stand as madness, he calmly but with decisive 
emphasis replied : " Well, I think if every minister in the United 
States would be as faithful it would be a great advance in set- 
tling this question." The judge's words spread as rapidly as 
had the sermons. They checked the flow of bitter criticism. 
Men stopped talking and began to think ; before the day was 
out a revulsion of feeling set in. Many of the most hostile found 
their anger changing into admiration — not convinced by Mr. 
Beecher's logic, but deeply impressed by his pluck. Those who 
shared his views felt emboldened to speak out ; and that middle 
class, the social weather-vanes who like to go with the majority, 
soon felt the changing breeze and began veering around to his 
side. The timid church-members took heart, the applications for 
letters of dismissal were recalled. The tide that threatened to 
overwhelm the plucky preacher only lifted him up and carried 
him the higher in public estimation. This was the first demon- 
stration of his ability to face and overcome an adverse public 
sentiment while championing a just but unpopular cause — an 
experience many times repeated in the forty years that followed. 
Sometimes it seemed as if he could not stand against the flood 
poured out upon him. Then the consciousness of right made 
him strong and gave him that great peace that no whirlwind of 
adversity could destroy, and roused up in him a determination 
to only work the harder. 

It was while in Indianapolis that he began his first real lite- 
rary work. It is true that he did some editorial work while at 
Lane Seminary, but that was too short-lived and occasional to be 
regarded as regular literary occupation. 

Here at Indianapolis he accepted the editorial chair of the 
Indiana Farmer and Gardener, and, as we are assured by those 
who were readers of that journal, threw around the subjects 
therein discussed a brightness of humor and fancy that made 
the otherwise dry topics of fodder, fertilizers, and plantings seem 
new and interesting subjects. 

• It may be of some service to the young 5 as showing how 



v 



I98 BIOGRAPHY OF 

valuable the fragments of time may become, if mention is made 
of the way in which we became prepared to edit this journal. 

" The continued taxation of daily preaching, extending 
through months, and once through eighteen consecutive months 
without the exception of a single day, began to wear upon the 
nerves, and made it necessary for us to seek some relaxation. 
Accordingly we used, after each week-night's preaching, to drive 
the sermon out of our heads by some alterative reading. 

" In the State Library were Loudon's works — his encyclopae- 
dias of Horticulture, of Agriculture, and of Architecture. We 
fell upon them, and for years almost monopolized them. 

" In our little one-story cottage, after the day's work was 
done, we pored over these monuments of an almost incredible 
industry, and read, we suppose, not only every line but much of 
it many times over ; until at length we had a topographical 
knowledge of many of the fine English estates quite as intimate, 
we dare say, as was possessed by many of their truant owners. 
There was something exceedingly pleasant, and is yet, in the 
studying over mere catalogues of flowers, trees, fruits, etc. 

" A seedsman's list, a nurseryman's catalogue, are more fas- 
cinating to us than any story. In this way, through several 
years, we gradually accumulated materials and became familiar 
with facts and principles, which paved the way for our editorial 
labors. Lindley's ' Horticulture ' and Gray's * Structural Botany ' 
came in as constant companions. And when, at length, through 
a friend's liberality, we became the recipients of the London 
Gardener s Chronicle, edited by Prof. Lindley, our treasures were 
inestimable. Many hundred times have we lain awake for hours 
unable to throw off the excitement of preaching, and beguiling 
the time with imaginary visits to the Chiswick Garden, to the 
more than oriental magnificence of the Duke of Devonshire's 
grounds at Chatsworth. We have had long discussions in that 
little bed-room at Indianapolis, with Van Mons about pears, with 
Vibert about roses, with Thompson and Knight of fruits and 
theories of vegetable- life, and with Loudon about everything un- 
der the heavens in the horticultural world. 

" This employment of waste hours not only answered a pur- 
pose of soothing excited nerves then, but brought us into such 
relations to the material world that we speak with entire modera- 
tion when we say that all the estates of the richest duke in Eng- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. igg 

land could not have given us half the pleasure which we have 
derived from pastures^ waysides, and unoccupied prairies." 

He was an earnest advocate of manual labor. He had no 
patience with those whose squeamish effeminacy made them look 
upon labor as degrading. 

On the fly-leaves of his " Editorial Agricultural Book," be- 
gun January 10, 1845, he wrote : 

11 It is my deliberate conviction that physical labor is indis- 
pensable to intellectual and moral health, that the industrial and 
producing interests of society are powerfully conservative of mo- 
rals. Especially do I regard the tillage of the soil as conducive 
to life, health, morals, and manhood. I sympathize with the ad- 
vance of society through practical physical labors more than I do 
through metaphysical speculations. I obtain clearer views of re- 
ligious truth through my sympathies with men and their life than I 
do through books and their thoughts. Nor do I think any theology 
will be sound which is made in the closet. It should be made in 
the street, shop, ship, office, and on the farm. I have followed 
both inclination and conviction in allying myself to the laboring 
classes." 

His knowledge on the subject of farming was not altogether 
theoretic. One of his old parishioners writes us : 

" He loved to work and toil, especially in his own garden. 
He always had the earliest vegetables in the market, and his gar- 
den was better than any other in the city. He loved to work 
among his flowers, and could call every flower by its name readi- 
ly. I think that he loved his flowers and took more pleasure 
with them than anything else, excepting his family. He certainly 
was more devoted to his family than any man I ever saw." 

It was no uncommon thing for him to take his vegetables to 
the market before daylight, sometimes, as an especial favor, 
taking his little five-year-old girl with him. 

From the report of the fall exhibition of the Indiana Horti- 
cultural Society we learn that Mr. Beecher took the three first 
prizes for the best exhibition of squashes, beets, and oyster-plants. 
His beets, it is stated, weighed from eight to fourteen pounds. 

The literary production which first attracted any general 
attention was his " Lectures to Young Men." The State 
capital seemed to be the headquarters for all those forms of temp- 
tation and vice which are particularly liable to undermine the 



200 BIOGRAPHY OF 

morals of the young. Many a young man, whose future seemed 
bright with the promise of an honorable and useful life, had Mr. 
Beecher seen swept from his feet and whirled away to a dishon- 
orable end — young men who might have been saved had some 
one been able to show them the dangers of the paths they were 
treading, whose beginnings seemed so pleasant and fair. Greatly 
distressed at what he saw, he finally determined to deliver a se- 
ries of lectures intended primarily for young men, and for the 
purpose of opening their eyes. These were subsequently revised 
and published, under the title of " Lectures to Young Men." 
The purpose of these lectures he aptly indicated in his preface : 

" When a son is sent abroad to begin life for himself, what 
gift would any parent consider excessive to him who should sit 
down by his side and open the several dangers of his career, so 
that the young man should, upon meeting the innumerable covert 
forms of vice, be able to penetrate their disguises, and to experi- 
ence, even for the most brilliant seductions, a hearty and intelli- 
gent disgust ? 

" Having watched the courses of those who seduce the young 
— their arts, their blandishments, their pretences — having wit- 
nessed the beginning and consummation of ruin, almost in the 
same year, of many young men, naturally well disposed, whose 
downfall began with the appearances of innocence, I felt an ear- 
nest desire, if I could, to raise the suspicion of the young and to 
direct their reason to the arts by which they are with such facility 
destroyed. 

" I ask every young man who may read this book not to sub- 
mit his judgment to mine, not to hate because I denounce, nor 
blindly to follow me, but to weigh my reason, that he may form 
his own judgment. I only claim the place of a companion ; and, 
that I may gain his ear, I have sought to present truth in those 
forms which best please the young ; and though I am not with- 
out hope of satisfying the aged and the wise, my whole thought 
has been to carry with me the intelligent sympathy of young men." 

He dedicated the book to his father — 

"to 
" lyman beecher, d.d. 

To you I owe more than to any other living being. In childhood 
you were my Parent, in later life my Teacher, in manhood my 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 201 

Companion. To your affectionate vigilance I owe my principles, 
my knowledge, and that I am a minister of the Gospel of Christ. 
For whatever profit they derive from this Book the young will 
be indebted to you." 

Our space forbids any attempt at reproducing or analyzing 
these lectures. 

The evils that he attacked were real, and he did not mince 
matters in the assault. In the course of his lectures some of his 
good people, including one or two of the elders, thought that he 
was too plain and outspoken in his description of the temptations 
and dangers that beset the young, and undertook to advise him, 
suggesting that he should be more prudent in the forms of his ex- 
pressions. He expressed regret that he should differ with them, 
but he proposed, he said, to treat the subject as he thought he 
ought, without regard to any instructions given. He did not pro- 
pose to fight a mad dog with a handful of straw. Notwithstand- 
ing the timidity of his advisers, it appears, from the universal 
testimony of those who heard them, that they did great good, 
awakening the community to the dangers he exposed. 

He was earnestly urged to revise and print them, " that their 
usefulness may be extended beyond the place of their delivery." 

His first attempts at their revision were not at all satisfactory 
to him, for he said afterwards : 

" I remember, when I was reading over my lectures to young 
men, with the intention of printing them, that I took down a vol- 
ume of Dr. Barrow's sermons and read two on the subject of 
* Industry and Idleness.' I had two lectures on similar subjects 
that I thought of publishing, but they seemed to me so mean in 
the comparison that I took up the manuscript and fired it across 
the room and under the book-case, where it lay I do not know 
how long, and said : ' I am not going to put those lectures into 
print and make an ass of myself.' I thought that I would be a 
fool to think there was anything in them worth publishing. Af- 
terwards, however, a volume of lectures to young men was lent to 
me, and when I read them they seemed so thin and weak that 
I said : ( If these are acceptable to the public and will do good 
I think I can print mine.' " 

The many editions published in this country and England 
justified his final conclusion. 

Although his salary had been doubled on coming to Indiana- 



202 BIOGRAPHY OF 

polis, had he received it all it would hardly have kept pace with 
his necessities. Many little necessities incident to their new 
surroundings called for expense. In the State capital two rooms 
over a stable would hardly meet the requirements of his social 
surroundings. It became necessary to hire an entire house, the 
spare rooms of which were devoted to boarders whose rent helped 
out the slender family purse. The house needed painting ; why 
hire a painter ? He could do it himself. Was he not born and 
brought up in sturdy old New England, where every lad was ex- 
pected, almost from the day he was weaned, to take care of him- 
self and add his labor to increase the common good ; where a 
man was thought wanting in ordinary " cuteness " who could not 
turn his hand to any job and do anything he had seen another do? 

Off he starts to the paint-store with his old horse and wagon, 
entering so enthusiastically upon the work in hand that he wholly 
forgot an engagement, made for that morning, to marry a couple. 
As the paints were being put up, he suddenly recalls his engage- 
ment, abruptly turns on his heel, rushes from the store, jumps 
into his wagon, and goes clattering down the street, leaving the 
astounded storekeeper in anxious solicitude for his sanity. Re- 
turning shortly, with a merry laugh he explained the cause of his 
precipitate outgoing. He found the couple waiting, married them, 
and then returned for his paint. Getting his supplies, he goes to 
work. He said : 

"I wanted to economize in every way I could, and meant to 
paint the house myself ; and I did. I got along well enough un- 
til I came to the gable end, which was two and a half stories 
high. When I began to paint there I was so afraid that I should 
fall off from the platform that I nearly rubbed out with my vest 
what I put on with the brush, but in the course of a week I got 
so used to climbing that I was as nimble as any painter in town." 

Here three more little ones came to swell the family circle, 
adding new joys to the heart of one who loved almost with a 
mother's devotion every little child he saw. But these joys 
brought three more -mouths to feed, three more little bodies to 
clothe. 

Fortunately food was abundant and very cheap. In the fall 
and early winter game abounded, so that pigeon, quail, and ducks 
were bought for almost nothing, and at times were literally given 
away. 



feitf Will i[} 

1 1 




o 



O 



o 



4) 

QQ 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 20? 

We remember the story oft told by him of the man bringing 
six dozen pigeons to town. He tried to sell them, and was 
laughed at. He then offered to give them away ; no one wanted 
them. " Well," he said, " I won't take them home ; perhaps if I 
leave them in my wagon in the street some one will steal them." 
Returning a half-hour later, he found that some other hunter 
equally anxious to get rid of his game had dumped eight dozen 
more into his wagon. 

His people would sometimes donate food or clothing. The 
best suit of clothes he owned was made over from a discarded 
suit donated by one of his parishioners. 

Yet these were among the happiest years of his life. 

For he found joy in his work. He loved his people and was 
beloved. Above all, his teaching was bearing rich harvest, and 
many, many souls found rest and peace through his words. His 
success was very gratifying, and urged him on to greater effort. 

Among the young his influence was especially marked. A 
genial playfellow and companion, entering with hearty zest into 
all their sports, helping them out of their little difficulties, he 
gained their confidence and love. He guided the feet of many 
into the paths of a higher and nobler life. 

One of these friends writes : 

" He had a class of young girls, and I do not think that any 
one that recited to him could ever forget his original way of 
teaching. There were eight in the class, and we enjoyed the 
hour spent with him. He developed our originality. He first 
attracted us toward Milton. We studied, for he inspired in us 
the desire to know. In after-years, in his visits to Indianapolis, 
the surviving scholars were looked up and called upon, and the 
children of those who were gone were asked after. With some 
of these scholars he was thrown more intimately than with others, 
for all were not in his church. In these he naturally took much 
interest and directed them in their reading. I remember his 
telling me to l let Bulwer alone and the French novels,' which 
were then first being translated. At a company, a church social, 
or the singing-school he had a merry word to say to one and 
another. All felt at home with him. 

" My brother tells this story : When he was nine years old 
he had with great labor made a kite, at least what he thought 
would serve as one. In those days there were no toy-shops here, 



204 BIOGRAPHY OF 

and, indeed, it was with difficulty material could be found out of 
which to manufacture a kite. But, as I said, he and his little 
sister had succeeded in shaping a thing which they called a kite. 
So, on a spring day, they set forth to fly it. My brother held the 
string and the little sister kept the kite off the ground. He ran, 
and she after him ; but run as they would, coax as they might, 
their efforts availed nothing. Finally, disappointed, footsore, and 
covered with dust, they stopped to take breath. While thus 
brooding over their failure they saw Mr. Beecher standing near, 
looking down upon them with an amused but sympathetic ex- 
pression on his face. ' What do you call that ? ' 'A kite,' was 
the melancholy response. 'Well ! well !' the kind heart fully tak- 
ing in the situation. ' Come to my house to-morrow afternoon.' 
There was hope in the tone, and the boy's heart bounded. The 
next day he went to Mr. Beecher's. He was shown a kite bigger 
than himself. He could scarcely believe his senses. Why, the 
tail even was long enough to set him wild. ' Where's your 
string?' asked Mr. Beecher. Out of his well-worn pocket, where 
all a boy's treasures are hidden, he drew forth a cotton string 
neither long nor strong. ' This will not do ; have you any money?' 
'No, sir.' 'Come, let's go and get a string.' To the nearest 
grocery-store, where in early times everything was kept, from 
pins up to ploughs, they went. A ball of twine was bought for a 
' bit'; one was not enough — two for a quarter. Out into the street 
they went, and the kite was a success. Away it flew over their 
heads, the heart of the happy boy flying with the kite far into the 
heavens, and won to his pastor for all time by this simple, kindly 
act." 

Like all mankind, he had to taste the bitter with the sweet 
and pass under the shadow of the dark cloud of sorrow. 

First his brother George, who had been a kind of guardian 
brother to him, and deeply loved, was killed. The news came 
with the shock of a lightning-bolt. 

" I was called to go to Jacksonville to deliver an address," he 
said, speaking of his brother's death. " The journey was a long 
one, across two States (or one and a half). I took my wife and 
child with me, and we were gone some two weeks. When, on re- 
turning, we had got within two miles of Indianapolis, and were as 
elated and songful and merry as one can imagine anybody to be, 
we met one of the elders of my church riding out from the city, 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 205 

and he said, after stopping to greet us : ' Have you heard the 
news ? ' ' No,' said I ; k what is it ?•' * Your brother George has 
killed himself.' I did not say a word, my wife did not say a 
word, and he did not say one word more. We rode on, and as 
we rode I could not help thinking, ' Killed himself ! killed him- 
self ! killed himself ! ' It was nearly an hour before we got home, 
and then I learned that my brother's death was caused by an ac- 
cident with a double-barrelled gun while he was shooting birds in 
the garden ; and it was a great relief to me to know that ' killed 
himself ' did not mean suicide." 

Later came the death of his little boy George, the first loss in 
his own immediate family. He wrote, a few years later, to his 
sister, Mrs. Stowe : 

" I was in a missionary field, enduring hardships, and thinking 
in myself always how to stand up under any blow, even if it were 
a thunder-stroke, with Paul's heroism at once firing me and 
putting me to shame. Our noble boy suddenly sickened. Our 
people did not know how to sympathize. Few came while he 
lived ; fewer yet when, on a bleak March day, we bore him 
through the storm, and, standing in the snow, we laid his beauti- 
ful, form in his cold, white grave. Eunice was heart-broken. My 
home was a fountain of anguish. It was not for me to quail or 
show shrinking. So I choked my grief and turned outwardly 
from myself to seek occupation." 

In later years this sorrow had hardly lost its acuteness : 

" I remember, to-night, as well as I did at the time, the night 
that my eldest-born son died. That was my first great sorrow. 
I remember the battle of hope and of fear, and I remember the 
victory of submission. The child revived in the night. I went 
to Indianapolis (I lived on the edge of that city), and I shall 
never forget the amazing uplift of soul that I had, nor that one 
unspoken, universal thought of prayer, which seemed to me to fill 
the whole hemisphere, for the life of my child. I think that if 
one ever came near throwing his soul out of his body, I did. And 
yet before the morning dawned the child had found a brighter 
world. This was a double sorrow because I had given him up 
and then taken him back again. Then came the sudden wrench. 

" It was in March, and there had just come up a great storm, 
and all the ground was covered with snow. 

' We went down to the graveyard with little Georgie, and 



206 BIOGRAPHY OF 

waded through it in the snow. I got out of the carriage, and took 
the little coffin in my arms, and walked knee-deep to the side of 
the grave, and looking in I saw the winter down at the very bot- 
tom of it. The coffin was lowered to its place, and I saw the 
snowflakes follow it and cover it, and then the earth hid it from 
the winter. 

" If I should live a thousand years I could not help shivering 
every time I thought of it. It seemed to me then as though I 
had not only lost my child, but buried him in eternal snows. It 
was very hard for faith or imagination to break through the 
physical aspect of things and find a brighter feeling." 

The attachment which his people felt for him was more than 
reciprocated. He always loved to recall these early years and in 
memory live over again their joys and sorrows, their struggles 
and triumphs. 

In the early winter of 1877, in the course of a Western lecture 
trip, revisiting Indianapolis, he wrote back : 

" I went to Indianapolis in the fall of 1849 with a sick babe 
in my arms, who showed the first symptoms of recovery after eat- 
ing blackberries which I gathered by the way. The city had then 
a population of four thousand. At no time during my residence 
did it outreach five thousand. Behold it to-day with one hundred 
and ten thousand inhabitants ! The Great National Road, which 
at that time was of great importance, since sunk into forgetful- 
ness, ran through the city and constituted the main street. With 
the exception of two or three streets there were no ways along 
which could not be seen the original stumps of the forest. I 
bumped against them in a buggy too often not to be assured of 
the fact. 

" Here I preached my first real sermon ; here, for the first 
time, I strove against death in behalf of a child, and was de- 
feated ; here I built a house and painted it with my own hands ; 
here I had my first garden and became the bishop of flowers for 
this diocese ; here I first joined the editorial fraternity and edit- 
ed the Far7ner and Gardener ; here I had my first full taste of 
chills and fever ; here for the first and last time I waded to 
church ankle-deep in mud and preached with pantaloons tucked 
into my boot-tops. All is changed now. 

" In searching for my obscure little ten-fq^t cottage I got lost. 
So changed was everything that I groped over familiar territory 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 207 

like a blind man in a strange city. It is no longer my Indianapo- 
lis, with the aboriginal forest fringing the town, with pasture- 
fields lying right across from my house ; without coal, without 
railroads, without a stone big enough to throw at a cat. It was 
a joyful day and a precious gift when Calvin Fletcher allowed me 
to take from the fragments of stone used to make foundations 
for the State Bank a piece large enough to put in my pork-barrel. 
I left Indianapolis for Brooklyn on the very day upon which the 
cars on the Madison Railroad for the first time entered the town ; 
and I departed on the first train that ever left the place. On a 
wood-car, rigged up with boards across from side to side, went I 
forth. 

" It is now a mighty city, full of foundries, manufactories, 
wholesale stores, a magnificent court-house, beautiful dwellings, 
noble churches, wide and fine streets, and railroads more than I 
can name radiating to every point of the compass. 

' The old academy where I preached for a few months 
is gone, but the church into which the congregation soon entered 
still is standing on the Governor's Circle. No one can look upon 
that building as I do. A father goes back to his first house, 
though it be but a cabin, where his children were born, with 
feelings which can never be transferred to any other place. As 
I looked long and yearningly upon that homely building the old 
time came back again. I stood in the crowded lecture-room as 
on the night when the current of religious feeling first was be- 
ginning to flow ! Talk of a young mother's feelings over her 
first babe — what is that compared with the solemnity, the en- 
thusiasm, the impetuosity of gratitude, of humility, of singing 
gladness, with which a young pastor greets the incoming of his 
first revival ? He stands upon the shore to see the tide come in ! 
It is the movement of the infinite, ethereal tide ! It is from the 
other world ! There is no color like heart color. The homeli- 
est things dipped in that for ever after glow with celestial hues. 
The hymns that we sang in sorrow or in joy and triumph in 
that humble basement have never lost a feather, but fly back 
and forth between the soul and heaven, plumed as never was 
any bird-of-paradise. 

" I stood and looked at the homely old building, and saw a 
procession of forms going in and out that the outward eye will 
never see again — Judge Morris, Samuel Merril, Oliver H. Smith, 



208 BIOGRAPHY OF 

D. V. Cully, John L. Ketcham, Coburn, Fletcher, Bates, Bill- 
iard, Munsel, Ackley, O'Neil, and many, many more ! There 
have been hours when there was not a hand-breadth between us 
and the saintly host in the invisible church ! In the heat and 
pressure of later years the memories of those early days have 
been laid aside, but not effaced. They rise as I stand, and move 
in a gentle procession before me. No outward history is com- 
parable to the soul's inward life ; of the soul's inward life no 
part is so sublime as its eminent religious developments. And 
the pastor, who walks with men, delivering them from thrall,, 
aspersing their sorrow with tears, kindling his own heart as a 
torch to light the way for those who would see the invisible,, 
has, of all men, the most transcendent heart-histories. I have 
seen much of life since I trod that threshold for the last time ; 
but nothing has dimmed my love, nor has any later or riper ex- 
perience taken away the bloom and sanctity of my early love. 
And I can truly say of hundreds : ' For though ye have ten thou- 
sand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers j for ht 
Christ Jesus I have begotte?i you through the Gospel' 

" But other incidents arise — the days of sickness, chills and 
fever, the gardening days, my first editorial experience, my luck 
in horses and pigs, my house-building ; and not a few scrapes — 
being stalled in mud, half-drowned in crossing rivers, long, lone- 
ly forest rides, camp-meetings, preachings in cabins, sleepings in 
the open air. 

" I was reminded of one comical experience as I was seeking 
on Market Street to find the old swale or shallow ravine which 
ran between my cottage and Mr. Bates's dwelling. It had for- 
merly been a kind of bayou in spring when the stream above 
town overflowed, but dried off in summer. To redeem it from 
unhealth a dike had been built to restrain the river and turn the 
superfluous freshets another way. But one year the levee gave 
way in the night ; and when the morning rose, behold a flood 
between me and my neighbor ! There was sport on hand ! It 
was too deep for_ wading, but I could extemporize a boat. I 
brought down to the edge my wife's large washing-tub, and in- 
tended with a bit of board to paddle about. No sooner was I in 
than I was out. The tub refused to stand on its own bottom. 
Well, well, said I, two tubs are better than one. So I got its 
mate, and, nailing two strips across to hold them fast together, I 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 



209 



was sure that they were too long now to upset. So they were, in 
the long line ; but sideways they went over, carrying me with 
them with incredible celerity. Tubs were one thing, boats an- 
other — that I saw plainly. 

" I would not be baffled. I proposed a raft. Getting rails 
from the fence, I soon had tacked boards across — enough of 
them to carry my weight. Then, with a long pole, I began my 
voyage. Alas ! it came to a ludicrous end. 

" A rail fence ran across this ravine in the field, just above 
the street. One end of the fence had loosened, and the water 
had floated it round enough to break its connection with its hither 
side. A large but young dog belonging to a friend had walked 
along the fence, hoping to cross dry-footed, till he came to the 
abrupt termination, and, his courage failing him, he had crouched 
down and lay trembling and whining, afraid to go back or to ven- 
ture the water. I poled my raft up to the rescue ; and, getting 
alongside, coaxed him to jump aboard, but his courage was all 
gone. He looked up wistfully, but stirred not. ' Well, you cow- 
ard, you shall come aboard.' Seizing him by the skin of the 
neck, I hauled him on to the raft, which instantly began to sink. 
It was buoyant enough for a man, but not for a man and a lub- 
berly dog. There was nothing for it — as the stupid thing would 
not stir, I had to ; and with a spring I reached the fence just ab- 
dicated by the dog, while he, the raft now coming to the surface 
again, went sailing down the pond and was safely landed below, 
while I was left in the crotch of the fence. One such experi- 
ment ought to serve for a life-time, but alas ! 

" There is no end of things gone by. They rise at every 
point ; and one walks encompassed with memories which accom- 
pany him through the living streets like invisible spirits." 



CHAPTER XI. 

Invitation to come East — Call to Plymouth Church — Friendly Misgivings 
— Plainly Outlining his Views — Early Success — Plymouth Burned — 
Preaching in the Tabernacle. 

MR. BEECHER had confidently expected to have remained 
permanently in the West, and to have grown up with 
the new but rising country ; but it was destined to be 
otherwise. 

His fame had spread Eastward, and in the early winter of 1846 
a tentative effort was made to call him thither. Mr. W. T. Cut- 
ler, returning from a visit at the West, wrote in December, 1846, 
to Mr. Beecher that Dr. Storrs had been called to the Church of 
the Pilgrims ; that one of Dr. Cheever's principal men, J. Hunt. 
had " observed to me that Dr. Cheever named you as the man 
for the Pilgrims, and he thinks that there will be new churches 
formed on the Congregational plan here and in Brooklyn, and 
that you are the man to build up one of them." While in Cin- 
cinnati Mr. Cutler called on Dr. Lyman Beecher relative to his 
son's going East, but "he set his face like flint against it." He 
then had a long and urgent talk with the son again, in answer to 
which he received the following letter : 

"Indianapolis, December 15, 1846. 

" Dear Sir : Your letter has just come to hand, and thanks 
for it. I am glad you saw father, for your sake, for his, and for 
mine. Touching the question of our former conversations, this 
is my position : My pride tells me that if the only question in 
life were personal advantage, he is on the right road who is de- 
veloping truth within himself, and the road to truth lies in one's 
own self, and not in the place where he lives. But my conscience 
tells me, and, I thank God, my whole heart goes with my con- 
science, that the grand question in human life is the work of 
benevolence — the doing good on our scale, just as God does on 
His. I am sure that the shortest road to one's own happiness is 
by making others happy. Now, in this work, the labor of use- 



/ 




Mr. Beecher and his Father at the time of Call to Brooklyn. 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECHER. 2 I I 

fulness, if there be one thing which, above all others, I especially 
abhor, it is this cant talk about ' taking care of ones influence 'j 
going where one can ' use his influe?ice to best advantage ' ; refrain- 
ing from this or that for fear 'of ignoring itiftuence] and all such- 
like trash. A man's influence is simply the shadow which useful- 
ness casts. Let him look out that he is doing enough, and doing 
the right things, and then he may spare all time usually employed 
in looking after his shadow lest it should give him the slip. 

" As to where a man shall live and labor I have no plan, no 
theory except this : That God has a very sufficient ability to 
make Himself understood when He wants a man. A man should 
work just where he is until he is clearly called somewhere else. 
This keeping one's ear open to hear if God is not calling, this 
looking out every little while to see if one is not wished for 
somewhere else, is rather of the nature of self-seeking. A min- 
ister, like a maiden, ought not to make the first overtures, nor to 
be over-eager to have them made to him. 

" Now, I set forth this long preamble because it has occurred 
to me that my situation and my conversations with you were a 
little queer, and that it was worth while to state explicitly where 
I stand. 

"Whenever it clearly seems to me that God has work for 
me to perform, I shall, I hope, perform it, wherever it lies and 
whatever the work may be. Moreover, when God has work for 
me in another sphere, I do not doubt that He will make it so 
plainly His voice that calls me that I shall be in no more doubt 
about it than Abraham was when called to leave his native land 
or when called to offer up his son. I have no plan for staying 
here, or for going to the West, or for going to the East. I 
leave it entirely with Him who called me to the ministry where I 
shall live, where and when I shall die ; and in all fields, actual or 
contemplated, I do desire above every other thing to have a heart 
prepared to receive that welcome call, joyous to every one who 
has tasted of the powers of the world to come, to go up a?id labor 
in a higher field, with ennobled faculties and results, every one 
of which shall be both perfect and illustrious. 

" I believe that Christ will surely lead you wisely, if you will 
be led ; and that He will point out to you what enterprises it will 
be wise for you to undertake, and to what one of all His multitu- 
dinous servants you should apply for help. And should I never 



212 BIOGRAPHY OF 

labor in such service with you or near you, in New York, what 
then ? I feel, in that respect, as if we were like the two portions 
of our army before Monterey. What matters it on which side of 
the city we are, since on either side we are bravely pushing our 
arms toward a common centre, and when we meet it will as- 
suredly be in the hour of victory! 

" But if ever I come to you or go to any other place, al- 
though I have no plan as to situations, I have, I hope, an im- 
movable plan in respect to the objects which I shall pursue. So 
help me God, I do not mean to be a party man, nor to head or 
follow any partisan effort. I desire to aid in a development of 
truth and in the production of goodness by it. I do not care in 
whose hands truth may be found, or in what communion ; I will 
thankfully take it of any. Nor do I feel bound in any sort to look 
upon untruth or mistake with favor because it lies within the 
sphere of any church to which I may be attached. 

" I do not have that mawkish charity which seems to arise 
from regarding all tenets as pretty much alike — the charity, in 
fact, of indifference — but another sort : a hunger for what is true, 
an exultation in the sight of it, and such an estimate and glory 
in the truth as it is in Christ that no distinction of sect or form 
shall be for one moment worthy to be compared with it. I will 
overleap anything that stands between me and truth. Whoever 
loves the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity and in truth is my brother. 
He that doeth God's will was, in Christ's judgment, His mother, 
His sister, His brother, His friend, His disciple. 

" Your visit has certainly been of collateral advantage to me. 
Some who did not seem to care whether I had anything to live 
on or not have been stirred up, at least to attempt to discharge 
the pledges to me for a support : $800 does not seem to me to be 
an extravagant salary, but I would gladly take $600 in lieu of it, 
if I could have it paid regularly. 

" Give my love to Mr. Day and family, if you know them ; 
if not, just take this letter in your hand, go to his store, show 
him this paragraph : ' Mr. Day, allow me to present to you my 
friend, Mr. Cutler." Mr. Cutler, I am happy in introducing you 
to an old and valued friend, Mr. Day.' 

"And now, as you are at the fountain of news, why will you 
not drop me a line from time to time, and keep me apprised of 
things in the great world ? You hold the pen of a ready writer 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECHER. 2 I 3 

as well as the tongue of a ready speaker. And though I may 
have little news to send in return, such as I have will I give unto 
thee. Truly yours, 

"H. W. Beecher." 

Again in February Mr. Cutler wrote, this time asking point- 
edly if Mr. Beecher would accept a call to Brooklyn, stating that 
the property formerly owned by the First Presbyterian Church — 
Rev. Dr. Cox — had been purchased by Henry C. Bowen, Seth B. 
Hunt, and David Hale ; that it would be vacant in May, and 
that they proposed to organize in it a new church on the Con- 
gregational plan ; that if he would come they would give him 
a salary of $1,500 per annum, and, if necessary, make it $2,000. 
Mr. Cutler held out many alluring inducements, but without ap- 
parent effect. Mr. Beecher would not even entertain the propo- 
sition. In the meantime Mr. Cutler shrewdly reasoned that if he 
would come East, even for a short time, it might be possible to 
make him change his mind. It was so arranged that Mr. Beecher 
received an invitation from the American Home Missionary 
Society to deliver an address, under its auspices, at what was 
then called the " May Anniversaries " held in New York. He 
accepted this invitation, intending, as he said since, " to urge 
young men to go West, to show what a good field the West was, 
and to cast some fiery arrows at men that had worked there and 
got tired, and slunk away, and come back. I remember that I 
was particularly glowing on this subject ; but I came East not 
knowing what I did. It was a trap. Brother Cutler (who has 
gone to heaven), it seems, had a little plan at that very time, and 
I was running into a noose, though I did not suspect it. The 
result of that visit was the formation of this church [Ply- 
mouth]. Mr. David Hale, of the Journal of Co7>imerce — whose 
son Richard is still one of our members, though he is not with 
us — with two or three others, desired at once to extend me an 
invitation to become the pastor of this church. But the church 
did not exist. It was like asking a young man to become the 
husband of an unborn girl. There was no church to be my 
bride. I refused to receive a call to an empty house. They 
therefore made haste to form a church ; and I think it was 
early in June of the same year that some twenty-five persons 
covenanted together over this very ground for the church as it 



2 1 4 BIOGRAPHY OF 

then stood. The main building fronted on one street, and the 
lecture-room on the other. Here they agreed to become a 
church of Christ ; and then they extended to me a call to be its 
pastor. The call was not publicly known until the October fol- 
lowing ; but still the mischief was done." 

On Sunday evening, June 13, 1847, Plymouth Church was 
formally organized with a membership of twenty-one, Rev. R. S. 
Storrs, of the Church of the Pilgrims, preaching the sermon. 

On the Monday evening following business meetings were 
held by both the church and society, in each of which it was un- 
animously voted to invite Mr. Beecher to be their pastor, with a 
salary of fifteen hundred dollars the first year, seventeen hun- 
dred and fifty the second year, and two thousand the third year 
and thereafter. 

A formal call was at once sent. 

For the first time the question was taken into serious conside- 
ration, and for the next two months every argument was pre- 
sented that might lead to an acceptance of the call, great stress 
being laid on the fact that in the larger field could be ac- 
complished a more important work and an influence might be 
exerted that would be felt throughout the entire country ; that 
the West could easily be reached from New York, when it might 
be difficult to reach New York from the West. 

Long and most urgent letters were sent to Dr. Lyman Beecher, 
begging him to withhold any adverse influence. It is very doubt- 
ful if any of the inducements or the flattering representations so 
strongly presented had succeeded in winning him from the field 
where he was then working, were it not that another influence was 
silently and powerfully at work. The health of his wife, who lit- 
erally was giving her very life to aid and sustain him in his work, 
was rapidly failing under the malarial influences of the West. It 
became very evident that she must have rest and a change of 
climate. A few years in the East might restore her health, then he 
could return and resume his work. In August he came to a de- 
cision, and on the 12th wrote his letter of resignation, in which 
he set out his reasons and plans : 

"Indianapolis, August 12, 1847. 
" To the Elders of the Seco7id Presbyterian Church, Indicmapolis: 
"Dear Brethren: I have the very painful necessity laid 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECH ER. 2 1 5 

upon me of relinquishing the pastoral charge of the church over 
which for eight years I have presided. I need not assure you 
that I do it with extreme grief. If I could have had the control 
of my own affairs I should certainly have supposed it wisest and 
best that, for the present at least, I should remain in the West 
and with you. It is only the firm belief that in removing tem- 
porarily to the sea-coast I should save the life and restore the 
health of my wife that has induced me to sever the connection 
which has so long and so pleasantly existed between us. I am 
peremptorily warned, not only by those in whose medical skill I 
place implicit reliance, but by a continual confirmation of their 
judgment in actual experience, to leave this climate if I would 
save her life. You will perceive in this state of facts that against 
which neither I nor any one can form any argument or persua- 
sion. I cannot express the feelings which have warred in my 
breast in the anticipation of this necessity, nor can I without the 
deepest regret recall the deficiencies of my ministry among you. 
But I shall never forget the kindness with which my failings have 
been borne, the sympathy which I have experienced from you in 
the vicissitudes of the past eight years, and that co-operation with- 
out which I am sure I could but in a small part have accom- 
plished the work which has been done. There are some details of 
arrangements which I desire to make, but which can be better 
treated in conversation. 

" I am, with Christian and personal affection, very truly 
yours, H. W. Beecher." 

Having decided, he wrote at once to the committee of Ply- 
mouth Church from whom he had received the call : 

" Indianapolis, August 19, 1847. 

" Dear Brothers ? I desire to convey through you to the 
Plymouth Church and congregation my acceptance of the call to 
the pastoral office tendered by them to me. 

"I cannot regard the responsibilities of this important field 
without the most serious diffidence, and I wholly put my trust in 
that Saviour whom I am to preach in your midst. I can heartily 
adopt the language of Paul: ' Brethren, pray for us, that the 
word of the Lord may have free course and be glorified? It will 
be necessary for me to remain yet for some time in this place, 



2 1 6 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

but I hope to arrive in Brooklyn in the middle of October, or at 
farthest by the first of November. 

" I am, in Christian love, most truly yours, 

"H. W. Beecher. 

" Jos. T. Howard, 
" H. C. Bowen, 
" Chas. Rowland, 

and others." 

While in the East, after having received the call from Ply- 
mouth Church and while the question of acceptance was still in 
doubt, Mr. Beecher also received a call from the Park Street 
Church of Boston — the same church where he had preached nine 
years before, when on his way back to Lawrenceburg with his 
young wife. 

On June 10, 1847, he received a letter from the Rev. Silas 
Aikens, the pastor of Park Street Church, stating that they very 
much desired Mr. Beecher to accept a call to the position of as- 
sociate pastor. 

Early in July a formal call was sent by the church and so- 
ciety to the same effect, but was shortly afterwards declined. 

The call to Brooklyn having been definitely accepted, Mr. 
Beecher began at once to arrange for the removal of his family. 
His salary was in arrears. To meet the necessities of his family 
he had been obliged to borrow five hundred dollars. This, with 
other and smaller debts, must be paid, and money must be raised 
wherewith to transport his family East. But how ? Fortunately 
this difficulty had been foreseen, and as soon as it seemed prob- 
able that the call would be accepted the friends at Plymouth 
Church, in prophecy of that generosity which characterized them 
in all after-years, promptly raised by subscription one thousand 
dollars, and notified Mr. Beecher to draw thereupon as he might 
need. 

About the first of October, 1847, he started Eastward, leaving 
Indianapolis on the first passenger-train run on the new road 
just built. Modern luxuries had not then been introduced, if we 
may rely upon his account of the ride : 

" The car was no car at all, a mere extempore wood-box, used 
sometimes without seats for hogs, but with seats for men, of 
which class I (ah me miserable !) happened to be one. And so 
at eleven at night I arrived in Madison, not overproud in the 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



217 



glory of riding on the first train that ever went from Indianapolis 
to Madison." 

October, 1847, marked a new era in Mr. Beecher's experience. 
By successive steps he had advanced from. field to field with 
steadily increasing responsibility, from the collegian tramping 
twenty miles to deliver an occasional address in some adjoining 
town on topics affecting public morals, to the young theologian 
still in the seminary, trying his powers in some little hamlet — a 
knight-errant breaking a lance with the adversary ; to the young, 
unknown missionary entering the lists for his first real, earnest 
battle against "the world, the flesh, and the devil"; to the ac- 
knowledged preacher called to the State capital, dealing stalwart 
blows at those evils which sap the public conscience and allure 
the youth into evil ways, a recognized leader not only within the 
limits of his Presbytery but even throughout his State. 

And at last, called to the metropolitan centre, he enters a field 
whose limits of influence were to be bounded only by the limits 
of the civilized globe. With each increase of influence came cor- 
responding responsibilities. So far he had developed resources 
sufficient for each increase in his burdens ; but would he be suffi- 
cient for this new experience ? He had fully sustained himself as 
a missionary and a preacher in a pioneer State, in a comparatively 
rude and uncultured society. He had earned a reputation that 
had preceded him East ; could he maintain it ? Could he meet 
the requirements of the refined, critical, and highly-cultured me- 
tropolis (for New York and Brooklyn were, to all intents, one 
great centre) ? Many feared, and kindly volunteered the infor- 
mation that neither the new church nor its new pastor would 
last many months. 

He was altogether too outspoken for his own good, said they. 
It was all very well for a minister to combat evil, but he must do 
it in the good old-fashioned, orthodox way : he should confine 
himself to generalities and not be too specific. There were 
some things he ought not to meddle with : the pulpit was no 
place for politics, and slavery was purely a political question. 
He would find that in New York the public would not tolerate 
those things which had been permitted to him in Indiana. 

If he persisted he would soon have empty pews to preach to, 
even if he did not have a personal demonstration of the folly of 
attacking those popular sins — sins which most of his clerical 



2 1 8 BIOGRAPHY OF 

brothers had had the good sense to leave alone. Endless were 
the similes and metaphors indulged in, of which the well-worn 
rocket was perhaps the most suggestive. 

Some amiable critics even went so far as to intimate that his 
success in the West was due more to the surreptitious use of the 
father's old sermons than any inherent ability in the son, and he 
was generously given just one year to run through the barrelful 
of such sermons supposed to have been brought on with him. 
The barrel, like the widow's oil-cruse, seems to have had a mi- 
raculous power of refilling. 

Many friends advised him against the change : the risk was 
too great, his experience too little. He said of this time : 

" In coming to Brooklyn I had but one single thought — that 
of zeal for Christ. I came under all manner of warnings and 
cautions. Many good brethren told me how men got puffed 
up in the city, what temptations I would encounter, and how I 
would very likely be conservative, and forget my zeal, and so 
on ; and I was obliged at last to say even to my father : 
' Father, do you understand, then, that God's grace only ex- 
tends to the country, and that He cannot protect anybody in 
the city ? ' " 

On the other hand, some counselled self-interest : " It is not 
necessary that you should settle in Brooklyn ; with your talent 
you will make more show in New York." " I didn't come to make 
a show," he replied. " I came to preach what I understand to be 
the Gospel of Jesus Christ to men, and this is the first open- 
ing, and I take it." 

He did not propose to have any misunderstanding on the 
part of his new church as to the course he should pursue. He 
intended to make that very plain and at the outset. If they 
wanted him they would have to take him with their eyes open 
— wide open. 

October io, the first Sunday after his arrival, he preached in 
the new church, both morning and evening. 

" My first sermon, I think, was directed to the Source of all 
true religion — the Lord Jesus Christ and His power. In my 
second sermon — on the evening of the first Sunday — I recollect 
that I lifted up the banner and blew the trumpet in the applica- 
tion of Christianity to intemperance, to slavery, and to all other 
great national sins. I said to those who were present : ' If you 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECHER. 2 1 9 

come into this church and congregation I want you to under- 
stand distinctly that I will wear no fetters ; that I will be bound 
by no precedent ; that I will preach the Gospel as I apprehend 
it, whether men will hear or whether they will forbear, and that 
I will a$)ply it without stint, and sharply and strongly, to the 
overthrow of every evil and to the upbuilding of all that is 
good.' " 

Well-meaning but timid friends took alarm at this bold dec- 
laration. It was not customary; it was not what they were used 
to; they came to him to " counsel him for his own good," they said. 
" Save yourself, anyway ; don't ally yourself to unpopular men 
nor unpopular causes. There is no need of it. You can have 
your own notions about abolition ; what is the use of preaching 
anti-slavery sermons ? " To their great distress their counsels 
had just the opposite effect intended : " I despised them all, and 
preached like thunder on those subjects, especially before pew- 
renting. For a period of more than ten years I never let a 
month elapse before pew-renting that I did not come out with 
the whole strength of my nature on the abominations of Ameri- 
can slavery. I remember saying, with some discourtesy and 
with language that I should not use now : ' If you don't want to 
hear such doctrines, don't take a pew here next time.' It had 
something of youthful eagerness in it, but I am proud that it 
pleased God to ally me to causes that were weak but right. It 
has ever been a cause of great gratification to me that I have not 
lost that spirit, and that I ally myself to that which I think to be 
right ; and I do not care what man says to me, provided only I 
can believe that God likes it, and that I have the testimony of 
His approval in myself." 

To have remained silent in the presence of such great evils 
was to have shared the responsibility of their existence. 

We quote here his views on this subject, uttered from his 
pulpit many years later: 

" In every reform from intemperance, from vice, from crime, 
each individual citizen is responsible to the degree of influence 
which he has, and if he does not exert it he is responsible for a 
neglect of duty — a binding duty. He is bound to create a public 
sentiment that shall work for virtue. He is bound to drain the 
community of all those evils that run together and form a chan- 
nel for vice and crime. It is not a matter of election, it is a. 



2 20 BIOGRAPHY OF 

matter of obligation ; and because there are the most respectable 
classes in the community that don't do it, you are not set free. 
Because the men of riches and the men of power and the men of 
standing in society don't do it, the poorest laboring man in the 
community, if he does not, under the direction of his rea'son and 
conscience, labor for the purification of the commonwealth, is 
responsible to God. He is bound to do it. If his individuality 
on the one side has shielded him against aggression, it brings 
with it also certain obligations, and he is bound to meet them. 
All parties hold their members only subject to the corrected 
judgment and moral sense of the individual. If they go with 
their party on the general ground that it is going right and is 
doing right, as far as the limitations of human ignorance and 
human power are concerned, travelling in the right direction also 
with many imperfect steps and many imperfect elements, he may 
justly go on with it ; but if he is committed, as were the parties 
of slavery, to so atrocious a wrong as that which violated the 
fundamental rights of the whole human family, a man is bound 
to fight the party, in and out of it : in it by correction, out of it 
by protest and opposition. And merely because he can say, 
' The party did it, I did not,' he is not relieved of responsibility. 
Inasmuch as you knew what was right and did not do it. so 
much you are involved in the guilt ; and there was a great deal 
of guilt. The Church itself was involved in the same — dumb 
pulpits, uncirculated Bibles, a corrupt and vicious public sen- 
timent. 

" When I came into Plymouth Church as its pastor there was 
probably hardly a single church in the bounds of New York or 
Brooklyn of any note that dared to say a word for the liberty 
of the abject slave. Was I wrong in protesting against it, with 
the knowledge that I had ? With the conscience that I had, had 
I been silent I should have been doomed justly to the stroke 
of God's righteous judgment; and the want of moral courage 
under such circumstances is a very great sin everywhere. You 
are not right to stand still in any great party, moving in any 
direction, doing wrong, without deliberately taking account with 
yourself. Am I striving to correct the evil by all the influence I 
can wield ? On finding that to be impossible, do I free myself 
from all imputation of partnership in any such guilt, one way or 
the other ? " 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEE CHER. 2 21 

Now it is easy enough to express such sentiments : it is 
popular; it is in the line of public sentiment. Then it was a very 
different matter, and the living up to them still more difficult. 

Recalling the early history of Plymouth Church, he said : 

" It was formed in the midst of the development of the 
greatest work of the modern century — the emancipation of the 
slaves in America, by which the industry of the Continent was 
also emancipated, and by which the Church and religion itself 
were saved from a worse than Babylonian captivity. 

"When -I came here you could get no great Missionary So- 
ciety, Bible Society, or Tract Society to say one solitary word for 
the slave. Such were the interests of the mercantile classes of 
the South that it was extremely difficult to exert there any anti- 
slavery influence. As the merchants largely held the funds, as 
the great societies needed support, and as churches were built by 
respectable men whose prosperity depended mainly upon the 
peace and order of the South, the position that this church took 
was a bold and unpopular one. Those who did not live then 
can have no conception of what it was to form a church that 
should stand right out in the intense light of the time, and de- 
clare for universal liberty and for the right of the slave to the 
Bible, and to full religious freedom. This church grew up right 
against a flinty way of bitterness and opposition." 

Such was the beginning, and such the times ! 

Although he began preaching in Plymouth Church, October 
10, 1847, Mr. Beecher was not formally installed until the nth 
of November following. On that day an ecclesiastical council 
was convened " by letters from the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, 
in the State of New York, at their lecture-room, . . . for the pur- 
pose of installing (if the way should be found clear) the Rev. 
Henry Ward Beecher as their pastor," etc. 

" After an extended and thorough examination of the pastor- 
elect respecting his views of the doctrine of natural and revealed 
religion, his experience of renewing and sanctifying grace, and 
his object in entering on the work of the Christian ministry, the 
council unanimously pronounced the examination sustained and 
voted to proceed to installation." 

The invocation and reading of the Scriptures was by the Rev. 
Dr. Humphrey, of Pittsfield, Mass. ; the sermon by Rev. Dr. Ed- 
ward Beecher, of the Salem Church of Boston, an older brother 



2 2 2 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

of the new pastor ; the installing prayer by Rev. Dr. Hewitt, of 
the Second Congregational Church of Bridgeport ; the charge to 
the pastor by Rev. Dr. Lansing, of the Second Congregational 
Church of New York ; the fellowship of the churches by Rev. 
R. S. Storrs, Jr., of the Church of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn ; ad- 
dress to the people by Rev. J. P. Thompson, of the Broadway 
Tabernacle, New York, and the concluding prayer by Rev. Dr. 
Bushnell, of the North Church of Hartford. 

As soon as he was fairly installed the pastor set himself 
vigorously to work to build up the young church, and to fill it 
with new converts. 

The audience-room of the church began to fill rapidly, in the 
morning being generally three-fourths full, and in the evening 
entirely full. Early in 1848 difficulty was found in accommo- 
dating those who wished to attend, the building being crowded 
from that time on, both night and morning. 

In the spring, daily morning prayer-meetings were held, under 
the conduct of the pastor. Soon revivals broke out in the 
church, which, though singularly free from undue excitement, 
produced a deep and wide-spread influence. More than seventy 
persons were converted, most of them joining Plymouth Church, 
the rest uniting with other evangelical churches. 

Notwithstanding the many doleful prophecies that greeted its 
early beginnings, and the " dangerous stand " taken by its pastor 
which alarmed so many conservative minds, the church was just 
perverse enough to prosper and grow rapidly — a perversity which 
characterized it for the next forty years. In a little over two 
years from its birth it had an enrolled membership of four hun- 
dred and four, of whom fifty-six joined in 1847 ; one hundred 
and fifty-two in 1848 ; one hundred and thirty-six in 1849 (the 
year of the fire), and sixty in the first part of 1850. 

On the 13th of January, 1849, occurred one of those fortunate 
mishaps which proved to be a blessing in disguise. For some 
time previous, the congregation had been greatly disproportion- 
ed to the capacity of the church ; the necessity of rebuilding 
began to be seriously discussed, when occurred a fire that ab- 
ruptly terminated the discussion. The building was so badly 
damaged that it was unanimously determined to rebuild rather 
than repair. 

The kindly sympathy of neighboring churches, in volunteer- 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECH ER. 22$ 

ing the use of their buildings for the houseless congregation, was 
gratefully accepted for a short time. 

It soon became apparent that this unsettled and migratory- 
condition was harmful to the church. It was therefore deter- 
mined to erect a temporary structure upon ground in Pierrepont 
Street, kindly offered by Mr. Lewis Tappan. In thirty days a 
building, one hundred by eighty feet, was put up, and in this the 
church made its home until the first Sunday in January, 1850. 

The whole expense of this " Tabernacle," as it was called, 
was twenty-eight hundred dollars. The subsequent sale of 
the building, together with the weekly collections, more than re- 
paid this outlay, while the pew-rents were amply sufficient to 
meet the current expenses. 

As soon as possible after the fire, steps were taken to put up 
the new building, which was to be constructed on a much larger 
scale than the old one. 

On May 29, 1849, tne corner-stone was laid, and on the first 
Sunday in January, 1850, the congregation worshipped in their 
new church. 

The new structure was built on Orange Street, and ran through 
to Pineapple. It was really two buildings under one roof, the 
church proper being one hundred and five feet long by eighty 
broad. Adjoining and opening into this, from the rear, was a 
lecture-room of two stories, eighty by fifty feet, the second story 
being the Sunday-school. 

The entire cost of the new church was about $36,000, of 
which $31,127 was raised upon scrip, bearing interest, payable in 
pew-rents, To provide for the balance, and a mortgage of $10,- 
500 on the old property, the new building was mortgaged for 
$16,000. The entire indebtedness and all encumbrances were 
paid off by 1867, at which time the church was entirely free from 
debt. 

The cost of the lecture-room and Sabbath-school was about 
$13,000, of which $10,800 were donated, the rest being paid 
partly by festivals and fairs held for the purpose, and partly from 
the general fund of the church. 

The Sabbath-school at this time consisted of two hundred 
and fifty scholars and thirty teachers. 

The seating capacity of the pews and choir-gallery of the 
church was about twenty-one hundred persons. This was 



2 24 REV < HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 

thought at first, by some, to be a very extravagant allowance. 
But in 1857 the seating capacity could not supply the demand, 
and folding-seats were placed in the aisles, fixed to the end of 
each pew, and so constructed as to fold up against the pew-side 
when not in use ; while benches were set along the walls all 
around the galleries, and in the vacant space in front of the pul- 
pit. These accommodated about eight hundred more, while the 
standing space, almost always occupied during the last twenty- 
five years, permitted about three hundred more to be present. 

As his last year at Indianapolis had been consecrated by the 
loss of his little boy, so in like manner were the first in his new 
pastorate. Scarce had a month passed when the death of his 
little girl " Caty " became the means of closer communion be- 
tween pastor and people through the bonds of sympathy and 
kind service. He wrote to his sister : 

" When Caty sickened and began her quiet march toward the 
once opened gate, to rejoin the brother (cherub pair), we found 
our house full of friends. Many of the truest, deepest hearts 
asked no bidding, but, with instinctive heart taught right, lived 
with us almost literally ; and when her form was to go forth from 
us, they embowered her in flowers, winter though it seemed, 
and every thought and remembrance of her is sweet in itself and 
sweet in its suggestions. 

" What had I to bear up against ? I was held up by increas- 
ing love and sympathy on every side. Of this world I had more 
than heart could wish ; of friends, never so many or so worth 
having ; and the effect, as might be supposed, has answered to 
the cause. I find now that it is with me as with mountains in 
spring-time — every fissure is growing to a rill, every patch of soil 
is starting its flowers, every shrub has its insect and every tree 
its bird." 



CHAPTER XII. 

Plymouth Church — The New Building — Sabbath Service — Prayer-Meet- 
ing — Weekly Lecture — Socials — Church Polity — The Pastor's Policy. 

AS we have stated, Plymouth Church took possession of its 
new building on the first Sabbath in January, 1850. Then, 
as on the Sabbaths of the nearly forty succeeding years in 
which Mr. Beecher ministered here, the crowd came and filled 
every available seat. Then began that sound, once heard never 
forgotten, and heard nowhere else so continuously, of the incom- 
ing multitude, the tread of hurrying feet like the sound of many 
waters, as the crowds, held back for a time until pew-holders 
have been in part accommodated, press in and take their 
places. Here, on this first Sabbath, arose that song of thanks- 
giving whose fulness and power were for so many years a marked 
feature of the religious service of this great congregation. Here 
began that long succession of sermons which opened to so many 
thousands, at first by the voice and then by the printing-press, 
the nearness, the righteousness, and the boundless love of God 
revealed in Jesus Christ. And here began on that day to as- 
cend those prayers which drew hearts into the very presence 
of the Most High and left them gladdened, refreshed, and filled 
as with the fulness of God. Blessed old Plymouth Church ! 
Its every memory, its very walls are dear unto multitudes. 

It was plain even to bareness — unnecessarily so in the opinion 
of many — both without and within, with not the slightest effort at 
show or even ornament. None of those harmonies of color nor 
graces of form, such as are now shown or attempted in almost 
every church edifice, were here found. It was builded with the 
simple conscientious purpose of enabling as many as possible to 
hear the Gospel, of affording every advantage to such as wished 
to meet together in the prayer-meeting and sociable, and of in- 
structing the young in the Sunday-school. Herein lay the 
beauty of the Plymouth Church building : its excellent adapta- 
tion to the great end in view. More than any church of that 
day, and, with all the progress of later times, excelled by but 



226 BIOGRAPHY OP 

few, if any, at the present time, Plymouth Church building af- 
forded superior accommodations for Gospel hearing and spirit- 
ual, educational, and social training. By placing the seats in a 
partial curve, by the admirable arrangement of the commodious 
galleries, and by pushing the pulpit well forward toward the cen- 
tre of the circle, the vast audience of nearly three thousand 
people were brought near together and near to the speaker. 
While this enabled him to address them with great ease, it 
also afforded an opportunity for the cultivation of that feel- 
ing of homeness and fraternity that always characterized the 
gatherings of this church with its pastor. 

The pulpit was then, as now, a plain platform, with no railing 
in front, and no other furniture than a set of chairs, a stand for 
notices, and an open table for the Bible ; as far removed as pos- 
sible from those boxes where the man must stand, cramped and 
stiff, while he delivers his message. An offering of flowers was 
also found there, the beginning of a custom which has been con- 
tinued, we believe, without the failure of a single Sabbath, from 
that day to this. 

Behind the pulpit was the organ and seats for a choir of fifty 
or more who should lead the great congregation in their songs of 
praise. 

In the rear of the audience-room, opening back into another 
street, was the lecture and prayer-meeting room, and above this 
were the parlors and the Sunday-school rooms. 

Such was the equipment that the pastor and Plymouth 
Church began to use on that first Sabbath in 1850. It seemed 
to many more than ample. The audience-room was more com- 
modious than any in the land. Would the young minister be 
able to fill it? Would he hold out? The "six months" that 
one of Brooklyn's most oracular of D.D.'s had given "that 
young man to run out in " had long since passed, and he gave, as 
yet, no signs of waning popularity; but perhaps he will, and a few 
possibly hoped, and some, it may be, feared, that it would be so ; 
but by far the larger part of that great congregation praised God 
that day in joyful confidence without any fears or misgivings. 
They had faith in their pastor as well as in God ; and he, con- 
scious that he had builded sincerely, without sham or pretence, 
had no question but that He who had begun this good work 
would carry it prosperously forward to the end. All these ap- 



REV. HENRY WARD BE EC HER. 2 2 J 

pliances had been demanded by the thousands in attendance. 
Their necessity was of God, hence they could trust Him to vin- 
dicate His own plans. The young pastor neither feared nor was 
anxious. He was the Lord's ; let Him do with him as He 
pleased. 

Of this feeling in connection with his preaching he himself 
says : " I had at that time almost a species of indifference as to 
means and measures. I cared little, and perhaps too little, 
whether I had or had not a church building. I thought of one 
thing — the love of Christ to men. This, to me, was a burning 
reality. Less clearly than now, perhaps, did I discern the whole 
circuit and orb of the nature of Christ ; but with a burning in- 
tensity I realized the love of God in Jesus Christ. I believed it 
to be the one transcendent influence in this world by which 
men should be roused to a higher manhood and should be trans- 
lated into another and better kingdom. My purpose was to 
preach Christ to men for the sake of bringing them to a higher 
life; and though I preferred the polity and economy of the Con- 
gregational churches, yet I also felt that God was in all the 
other churches, and that it was no part of my ministry to build 
up sectarian walls ; that it was no part of my ministry to bom- 
bard and pull down sectarian structures ; but that the work of 
my ministry was to find the way to the hearts of men, and to 
labor with them for their awakening and conversion and sancti- 
fication. 

" I have said that I had no theory ; but I had a very strong 
impression on my mind that the first five years in the life of a 
church would determine the history of that church and give to 
it its position and genius ; that if the earliest years of a church 
were controversial or barren it would take scores of years to 
right it ; but that if a church were consecrated, active, and ener- 
getic. during the first five years of its life, it would probably go on 
through generations developing the same features. My supreme 
anxiety, therefore, in gathering a church, was to have all of its 
members united in a fervent, loving disposition ; to have them 
all in sympathy with men; and to have all of them desirous of 
bringing to bear the glorious truths of the Gospel upon the hearts 
and consciences of those about them. 

" Consequently I went into this work with all my soul, preach- 
ing night and day, visiting incessantly, and developing as fast 



2 28 BIOGRAPHY OF 

and as far as might be that social, contagious spirit which we 
call a revival of religion." 

The services in the church were then, as ever since, in har- 
mony with the building — simple and without ostentation, differ- 
ing from those of other Congregational churches only in the spi- 
rit of unusual heartiness and the impression of unusual power. 

When the bell ceased tolling the organ began its work of pre- 
paring the hearts of the great multitude for worship. Then fol- 
lowed the invocation by the pastor, always devout, always joyful 
and trustful, uniformly sincere, and always varied. No set 
phrase ever took possession and held in its formal grasp the ex- 
pression of his praise and expectant prayer : 

" Thou that dost hold the sun, and pour forth therefrom the 
light and glory of the day, from Thine own self let there come, 
streaming as the daylight, those influences that shall awake in us 
all hope and all gladness of love. For we sleep except when 
Thy beams are upon us. Only when we are in God are we alive. 
Let us in, O our Father ! and may all that is within us rise up 
to worship Thee. Accept our service according to what we 
would do and according to what Thou wouldst have us do. 
Bless the word and the reading thereof. Bless our songs of 
praise and our fellowship therein. Bless our communion one 
with another and with Thee. Bless us in our meditation, in the 
services of the day, at home, and everywhere. Make this a 
golden day to our souls, through Jesus Christ our Redeemer. 
Amen." 

Then followed, in those early days — in later years he often 
omitted it — the reading of the hymn, simply, with no straining 
after effect, but so as to give the full meaning of the words to be 
sung, and in a measure to interpret their spirit. The singing 
which followed, so full and appreciative, was something to re- 
member. It was the voices of the multitude joining and blending 
in one great, full song of adoration and thanksgiving. 

The reading of the Scripture was usually without comment, 
but so vivid to his thought were the great truths uttered, and so 
flexible was his voice in giving them expression, and so natural 
the adaptation of his whole manner to their import, that his sim- 
ple reading gave a better understanding of Scripture than the 
explanations of most other men. 

The prayer that followed the hymn was very marked in its 



REV. HENRY WARD BE EC HER. 11§ 

general characteristics, comprehensive, and adapted to the occa- 
sion and the needs of the people before him. It invariably gave 
expression to a thankful spirit, lamented sins and failures, was 
permeated with a yearning desire for communion with God and 
with great sympathy with men, class after class of whom he 
brought before the Heavenly Father for deliverance, comfort, 
and blessing. 

The sermon was long, consuming from three-quarters of 
an hour to an hour, and sometimes more, in delivery, and 
usually combined in a very marked degree the three elements, 
the exegetical, the philosophic, and the hortatory. He delighted 
in giving a full and broad opening of Scripture, that all might 
be quickened and fed ; in showing the relation and harmony of 
the truths thus presented to other truths already admitted, mak- 
ing their bearings clear by frequent illustrations, and pressing 
them in the progress of the sermon, and especially at the close, 
upon the acceptance of his hearers. His preaching informed, 
convinced, inspired, and moved men to decisive action Godward, 
or it was, in his view, a failure. 

The benediction with which the services closed was as if he 
saw the hands of the living Saviour stretched out over His be- 
loved people, and he became but a mouthpiece for the solemn 
and tender expression of His beneficence. 

Then followed the informal after-meeting, unadvertised and 
unarranged — the pressing forward to the pulpit, or the waiting 
in the aisles until he should pass out, of some who perhaps had a 
word of thanks for help received in the sermon, of others asking 
questions or bearing messages, of strangers who wished to press 
his hand, or of troubled ones who wanted a word of cheer. The 
meeting continued down the aisle, out into the porch, out on to 
the street, as friends still walked along with him, talking as they 
went. 

The weekly meetings of the church, besides Sabbath services 
and the Sunday-school, at this early period, were three : a " Lec- 
ture," Tuesday evening ; a " Sociable," Thursday evening; and a 
Prayer-meeting, Friday evening. 

The weekly lecture was a familiar meeting of the church 
family and their friends, where, in simple and colloquial speech, 
the pastor instructed them in the things that pertain to the spirit- 
ual life. It was always spoken of, not as a sermon^ but as a 



23O BIOGRAPHY OF 

"Lecture-Room Talk" The subjects chosen were practical, like 
these, given in the order in which he delivered them : " Groping 
after God," " Praying for Others," " Fervency of Religious Feel- 
ing," " Conversing with the Impenitent," picked up in his inter- 
course with his people, selected with direct reference to solving 
doubts, removing difficulties, and securing spiritual growth and 
activity. In these, perhaps more than anywhere else, he dis- 
played the resources of his great common sense, revealed the 
depth of his spiritual life, and drew most largely on the wealth 
of his own Christian experience. 

The prayer-meetings did not differ in form from those that 
are common in Congregational churches. A moment before the 
hour for the meeting Mr. Beecher came upon the platform, threw 
his hat upon the floor by the side of his chair, sat down, and, 
throwing back his cloak, took up the "Plymouth Collection," and, 
the instant the bell ceased tolling, without rising, gave out in a 
clear, firm voice the number of some familiar hymn, usually of 
thanksgiving. The pianist wasted no time in playing the tune 
through, but struck the opening note firmly, the audience joined 
without delay and sang without dragging, and the meeting gained 
that most important advantage — a good send-off. No sooner had 
the hymn ceased than the pastor arose and read a passage from a 
Bible which he held in his hand. He then led in a prayer, sim- 
ple, confiding, hopeful, tender, that helped all weary and waiting 
souls to realize that they were in the presence of their very 
best Friend, and gave them needed help. Another hymn, given 
out in the same manner and sung with the same spirit, follow- 
ed. Then, that there might be no break in the movement of 
the service, looking at the individual addressed, usually some 
one of the old warriors upon the front seats, he would say, 

"Will Brother lead us in prayer?" When this prayer was 

finished his eye seemed to take a broader range and search out 
some of the younger and less experienced to bring them into 
the work. Woe be to you then if you have come in late, 
taken a back seat, and tried to keep out of sight ! He seemed 
to know instinctively where you were, and how you felt, and how 
essential, if you would enjoy the meeting, that this ice should be 
broken ; and on this second call for leaders you would be very 
likely to hear your name pronounced with that same kind but 
authoritative intonation that you could neither pretend not to hear 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 23 I 

nor refuse to obey. Another hymn increases the kindly warmth 
of Christian feeling that has begun to pervade the audience like 
an atmosphere, and under its inspiration other prayers are offered, 
at this stage by volunteers ; experiences are related, often by the 
pastor ; questions are asked upon some practical difficulty, and 
answers are given ; failures and sins are confessed and lamented, 
and prayers are requested and offered, until the hour was passed 
all too quickly. Another hymn, and then the benediction closes 
the meeting. 

The social meetings, for the accommodation of which Mr. 
Beecher added the parlors — at that time an unusual feature of a 
church — were a very earnest attempt made by him in the meri- 
dian of his social power and enthusiasm, and in a church more 
than ordinarily inspired by his loving spirit, to overcome the 
separations which different conditions and dissimilar social train- 
ing and surroundings bring about in the Church of Christ, and 
to realize as nearly as possible the family ideal. A sewing-meet- 
ing was held in the afternoon for some benevolent enterprise, 
followed by a plain tea to which all were invited. Friends 
dropped in, pleasant conversation ensued, and perhaps a few se- 
lections of reading or song, prepared for the occasion, were 
given. " Mr. Beecher then took his stand in the centre of the 
large room, rapped with his pencil and called his flock around 
him, and gave them ten minutes of appreciative, kindly, witty, 
helpful talk. * Plymouth Collection of Hymns ' was then handed 
round, and everybody sang, or tried to. After this, prayer and 
'good-night.' " This was about the outline, and for several years 
it was moderately successful ; but busy times crowded in upon it, 
unregulated elements worked into it, getting and doing more harm 
than good, and at length it was given up, and the members of 
Plymouth Church chose their companions according to social 
affinities, similarity of position, and circumstances, like other 
people. 

Such preaching and labors, with such appliances, under the 
blessing of God were sure to bring abundant results, and revivals 
followed each other in quick succession all through those early 
years ; in fact, Plymouth Church thus far during its whole his- 
tory may be called a revival church. 

Its polity was Congregational, as we find in its manual of 
1850: 



232 REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

" This church is an independent ecclesiastical body, and in 
matters of doctrine, order, and discipline is amenable to no 
other organization. This church will extend to other evangelical 
churches and receive from them that fellowship, advice, and as- 
sistance which the laws of Christ require." 

His own policy toward the church is given in these words : 

" I have never managed. I have never employed manage- 
ment. I have tried to inspire kind feelings and thus lead men to 
take up their crosses. I have never sought to exert my authority, 
but to promote the utmost freedom of thought and action. . . . 
I have maintained from the beginning the most profound desire 
that there should be a church-life among you quite independent 
of me, and that as the pulpit was independent, so should the 
pews be also. I have scrupulously avoided meddling with the 
liberties of this church, except to enforce them. My simple aim 
from the beginning has been to develop among you as high a 
standard of manhood, and of Christian manhood, as the infirmity 
of human nature would permit ; and for that — the exaltation of 
manhood in Christ Jesus — I have labored in season and out of 
season : not without flaw, not without fault, not without sin, but, 
as God is my witness, with every power of my soul and body and 
understanding, from year to year." 

Such was Plymouth Church as she stood a score and a half 
and more years ago, and as she still remains. 

" Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth is this our 
Mount Zion " well expresses the feelings of multitudes as they 
recall these years and remember these places. Her streets of 
Sabbath service and work-day conference and prayer were con- 
tinually trodden by eager, crowds, and were made beautiful and 
attractive by the Christian fellowship that grew up and blossom- 
ed here on every side under the inspiration and culture of one 
who himself so trustfully, hopefully, and exultingly walked with 
God. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

Beginning of the Great Battle — Five Great Eras — Compromise Measures 
of 1850 — "Shall We Compromise" — The Fugitive Slave Law De- 
nounced — Right of Free Speech Defended — Commercial Liberty — 
Fighting Caste — Liberty of the Pulpit Defended — Quickness of Re- 
tort — Sentiment of the Times — Reaction— Visit of Kossuth — Election 
of 1852 — The Parker Controversy — Degraded into Liberty — John 
Mitchel — Garrison — Close of this Era. 

OTHER things than opening the church building contributed 
to make 1850 an eventful year to Henry Ward Beecher. 
In that year slavery came to the place of supreme inte- 
rest in our national affairs which it never afterwards lost until it 
was swept away in the battle-storm of 1861-65. 

The very month that Plymouth Church took possession of its 
new house, the first month of the last half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, Henry Clay submitted a series of resolutions in the Senate 
of the United States as " compromise measures for a final and 
complete adjustment of the slavery question." In the debate, 
passage, and enforcement of these measures, the utterly antago- 
nistic nature of the two contending elements, liberty and slavery, 
which had been brought together under our Constitution, became 
so evident ; slavery, from the very necessity of self-preservation, 
became so aggressive, advanced claims so comprehensive and so 
forced the fighting, that the very measures intended to com- 
promise the whole difficulty made it clear that there could be no 
compromise. There could be no amicable adjustment of inte- 
rests so diametrically opposed ; one or the other, liberty or sla- 
very, must take undivided and undisputed possession of the gov- 
ernment. From debate of words the conflict passed rapidly to 
the argument of arms, first on the plains of Kansas and even- 
tually over the whole southern half of our country, developing 
into the greatest civil war ever known in the world's history — a 

233 



234 



BIOGRAPHY OF 



war in comparison with which, in the numbers engaged on either 
side, in the breadth of the battle-field, in the agents of de- 
struction employed and the important interests at stake, Eng- 
land's Wars of the Roses, and even the strife of the rival claim- 
ants for the imperial purple of Rome, were insignificant and 
secondary contests. 

The part of this great slavery conflict in which Mr. Beecher 
was actively engaged had five distinct eras, clearly marked by 
well-defined boundaries, each presenting peculiar difficulties of 
its own to be overcome, and each bringing forward peculiar and 
important questions for solution. The first began with the agita- 
tion of the Compromise measures of 1850, and ended in the 
passage of those measures and their enforcement, more or less 
complete, during the uneasy years of 1850 and 1853. 

The second began with the proposition to repeal the Missouri 
Compromise measures and continued through what was known as 
"The Kansas Struggle," until April 1, 1858, when the first sub- 
stantial victory ever won by the free States was gained in Con- 
gress in the permission to give the actual residents of Kansas a 
fair vote upon the question of the acceptance or rejection of the 
infamous Lecompton Constitution. 

The third began with the abandonment by the slave-power of 
its dependence upon legislative enactments, which its defeat in 
Kansas had proved to be futile, and the inauguration of an era 
of secession and violence, and ended with the Proclamation of 
Emancipation, which took effect January 1, 1863, and which le- 
gally destroyed slavery in all the States in rebellion, and sub- 
stantially within the whole domain of the United States. 

The fourth era began with the issuing the Proclamation of 
Emancipation; extended through two years and more of battle by 
which the proclamation was carried into effect, and slavery was 
destroyed de facto as it had already been de ju?-e y and foreign in- 
tervention was prevented ; and ended with raising the flag over 
Sumter, the sign of the restoration of our national authority over 
a free and undivided national domain. 

The fifth includes the period of reconstruction, in which the 
difficult task of bringing the States, once in rebellion but now 
submissive, back into the Union was successfully accomplished. 
It covers the ground from the close of the war to the present 
time, or, more properly, from the death of President Lincoln, 



RE V. HE A 'R Y WA RD BEE CHER. 235 

when the South lay prostrate at the feet of the victorious North, 
to the election of President Cleveland, when, as Mr. Beecher 
hoped and believed, sectional lines were obliterated and the 
South once more saw the candidate she favored raised to be the 
chief magistrate of our common country. 

The Compromise measures of 1850 were conceived for the 
purpose of removing the serious and dangerous complications that 
had arisen, between the North and the South, in the attempt to 
organize the territory recently acquired from Mexico, and in 
admitting California as a free State with a constitution for ever 
prohibiting slavery within her borders. The South felt that such 
an addition to the free States would so disturb the balance of 
power between the sections that something must be given her as a 
compensation. Hence these Compromise measures, which pro- 
vided for the admission of California as a free State, but gave the 
South, as an offset, a more stringent Fugitive Slave Law and paid 
Texas ten millions of dollars for the adjustment of her State 
boundaries. Honestly intended, no doubt, and urged by the 
mover, Henry Clay, and accepted by many who disliked it, from 
patriotic motives, this Compromise was, nevertheless, wrong in 
principle and proved only mischievous in results. It rested on 
the false theory that the development of both liberty and slavery 
was equally the duty of the Republic, and that whatever gain was 
made by the former must be equalized to the latter by some new 
concession, and led to constantly increasing disturbance in both 
sections. While failing to satisfy the more radical men of the 
South, it was utterly abhorrent to a much larger body at the 
North. It seemed to the latter to be but another great step 
taken by the slave-power in its attempt to gain possession of the 
whole land. The first had been the Missouri Compromise, in 
which slavery, surrendering what it never owned — viz., the ter- 
ritory north of 36 30', called Mason and Dixon's line — gained 
Missouri and a quasi right to all territory south of that line. In 
this second great step now proposed they did not fail to note 
that the provision to prohibit slavery in the newly-acquired terri- 
tories, called the " Wilmot Proviso," had been defeated in Con- 
gress, nor fail to see that in these Compromise measures, should 
they be carried, the slave-power would secure the right to hunt 
and capture its fugitives in every city, town, and home of the free 
States, and to compel every Northern citizen to aid in the work, 



2^6 BIOGRAPH Y OF 



O 



thus making, so far as fugitives were concerned, slave territory of 
the whole North. They saw in this measure a great advance 
towards nationalizing this institution and securing for it the right, 
aimed at by its advocates from the first, to go unquestioned and 
protected wherever the authority of the Constitution of the 
United States was recognized. If this were passed they felt it 
to be not at all improbable that the threat of Senator Toombs, of 
Georgia, to call the roll of his slaves from the steps of Bunker 
Hill Monument, would be executed, and they opposed it with 
an energy born both of conviction and abhorrence. In this op- 
position none were more strenuous than Mr. Beecher. Speaking 
of this period, he says : 

" In 1850, when the controversy came up about Clay's Omni- 
bus Bill, including the Fugitive Slave Laws, I was thoroughly 
roused, and in the pulpit and with my pen I attacked with the ut- 
most earnestness the infamous Fugitive Slave Bill. It was then 
that I wrote that article, ' Shall we Compromise ? ' It was read 
to John C. Calhoun on his sick-bed by his clerk, and he raised 
himself up and said : ' Read that article again.' The article 
was read. ' The man who says that is right. There is no alter- 
native. It is liberty or slavery.' And then, when Webster 
made his fatal apostasy on March 7, 1850, I joined with all 
Northern men of any freedom-loving spirit in denouncing it 
and in denouncing him. Forthwith, after a paralysis of a few 
weeks, his friends determined to save him by getting all the old 
clergymen — such men as Dr. Spring, Dr. Lord of Dartmouth, and 
the Andover professors — to take his part. The effort was to get 
every great and influential man in the North to stand up for 
Webster; and then it was that I flamed. They failed utterly. Pro- 
fessor Woolsey of New Haven, Dr. Bacon, Dr. Hopkins, President 
of Williams College in Massachusetts, and various other most 
influential men, absolutely refused to sustain Webster." 

In the issue of the Independent of February 21, 1850, filling 
three columns, we have the famous article referred to above. 
We quote only enough to indicate its spirit and line of argu- 
ment : * 

*This article entire can be found in Mr. Beecher's * Patriotic Ad- 
dresses," published by Fords, Howard & Hulbert, New York City. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 2^1 

" SHALL WE COMPROMISE ? 

" Mr. Clay's Compromise has been violently resisted by the 
South and but coldly looked upon by the North. 

" It is not that both sides are infatuated and refuse a reason- 
able settlement; but the skill of Mr. Clay has evidently not 
touched the seat of the disease. He either has not perceived or 
else has not thought it expedient to meet the real issue now be- 
fore the people of the United States. The struggle now going 
on is a struggle whose depths lie in the organization of society in 
the North and South respectively ; whose causes are planted in 
the Constitution. There are two incompatible and mutually de- 
structive principles wrought together in the government of this 
land. . . . These elements are slavery and liberty. . . . One or 
the other must die. 

".".-'. The South now demands room and right for extension. 
She asks the North to be a partner. For every free State she de- 
mands one State for slavery. One dark orb must be swung into 
its orbit, to groan and travail in pain, for every new orb of lib- 
erty over which the morning stars shall sing for joy. 

"... It is time for good men and true to gird up their loins 
and stand forth for God and humanity. No compromises can 
help us which dodge the question, certainly none which settle 
it for slavery. . . . 

" There never was a plainer question for the North. It is her 
duty openly, firmly, and for ever to refuse to slavery another 
inch of territory, and to see to it that it never gets it by fraud. 
It is her duty to refuse her hand or countenance to slavery where 
it now exists. It is her duty to declare that she will under no 
consideration be a party to any farther inhumanity and injus- 
tice. . . . 

" Mr. Clay's Compromise resolutions demand better provision 
for the recovery of fugitive slaves, and a bill is now pending in 
the United States Senate for that purpose. On this matter our 
feelings are so strong that we confess a liability to intemperance 
of expression. 

" If the compromises of the Constitution include requisitions 
which violate humanity, I will not be bound by them. Not even 
the Constitution shall make me unjust. If my patriotic sires 
confederated in my behalf that I should maintain that instru- 



238 BIOGRAPHY OF 

ment, so I will to the utmost bound of right. But who, with 
power which even God denies to Himself, shall by compact fore- 
ordain me to the commission of inhumanity and injustice ? I 
disown the act. I repudiate the obligation. Never while I have 
breath will I help any official miscreant in his base errand of re- 
capturing a fellow-man for bondage ; and may my foot palsy 
and my right hand forget her cunning if I ever become so un- 
true to mercy and to religion as not by all the means in my power 
to give aid and succor to every man whose courageous flight tells 
me he is worthy of liberty ! 

" . .. . From those compromises, like Mr. Clay's, which seek 
for peace rather than for humanity — from such compromises, 
guileless though they seem, and gilded till they shine like 
heaven, evermore may we be delivered." 

This battle in Congress resulted, like every battle since the 
adoption of the Constitution, in a victory for the slave party. In 
September of this year, 1850, the Compromise measures, which 
had passed both Houses of Congress, were signed by President 
Fillmore and became by a very decided majority the law of the 
land. Many things had contributed to this result. On the one 
hand, there was a strong party in the South, representing largely 
the sentiment of that whole section, who felt themselves aggrieved 
and deprived of their rights under the Constitution, since they 
could not carry their property with them into the common terri- 
tory of the Union, and who saw in these Compromise measures a 
step in the direction of nationalizing their peculiar institution ; 
on the other the commercial and manufacturing interests of the 
North demanded a cessation of strife, that they might enter into 
the prosperity opened to them by the discovery of the gold 
upon our Western coast ; again, the fear of disruption, if the bit- 
ter discussion in Congress should continue, reconciled many to 
such measures as promised peace ; also, the habit of compromise, 
which had been early formed, and stood apparently justified by 
years of prosperity and growth, made it easier to again adopt 
this course ; and, perhaps more influential than any other, the 
leaders most beloved and trusted at the North were in favor 
of the measure. Henry Clay was its originator, and Daniel 
Webster, the great expounder of the Constitution, in his fatal 
speech of March 7, 1850, had justified the Compromise mea- 
sures, spoke not a word in condemnation of the legal or moral 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 239 

crudities and enormities of the Fugitive Slave Law, and had re- 
served the lightning of his sarcasm and the thunder of his con- 
demnation for the Abolitionists : 

" Nothing can be plainer than that all parties in the state were 
drifting in the dark, without any comprehension of the elemental 
causes at work. Without prescience or sagacity, like ignorant 
physicians, they prescribed at random ; they sewed on patches, 
new compromises on old garments, sought to conceal the real 
depth of the danger of the gathering torrent by crying peace ! 
peace ! to each other. In short, they were seeking to medicate 
volcanoes and stop earthquakes by administering political qui- 
nine. The wise statesmen were bewildered and politicians were 
juggling fools." 

If the anti-slavery men of the North hated the Compromise, 
and especially the Fugitive Slave clause in it, while it was being 
debated in Congress, their abhorrence was increased a thousand- 
fold now that all it had cost and all it threatened was in a mea- 
sure comprehended. Looking at it calmly, they saw that safe- 
guards which from time immemorial had gathered around the 
individual to protect him in person and liberty had, for a very 
large class in the community, been suddenly destroyed. 

Trial by jury was denied. Opportunity for the accused to 
summon witnesses in his own defence was not given, and "in no 
trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged 
fugitives be admitted to evidence." He had no hearing before 
any competent judge, but before a commissioner appointed to 
take depositions, who, whatever his ability or lack of ability, 
was clothed by this infamous act with plenary power in the pre- 
mises. 

On the simple certificate of this man the unhappy victim was 
hurried off at once into slavery, and no stay of proceedings or 
liberty of appeal was granted. Dumb, undefended, his destiny 
at the mercy of any accuser, and of a commissioner possibly 
ignorant and possibly vicious, the accused was consigned to a 
state worse to many than death. 

Aimed at a particular class, its injustice was seen to be indis- 
criminate enough to make an attack possible upon individuals of 
any class; and its provisions for the deprivation of a single right 
made necessary such a stringency in the exercise of other rights 
as could not be tolerated in a free community. 



24O BIOGRAPHY OP 

Atrocious in itself, it became still more offensive and danger- 
ous by reason of the ease with which its provisions could be em- 
ployed by villains for kidnapping negroes, or even white men, 
who had never been slaves. It was stated and believed that 
along the whole line between the slave and free States arresting 
fugitives at once became a regular business, with very little care 
in many instances as to the previous liberty or slavery of those 
arrested. Instances were continually being recorded of colored 
boys and girls being unexpectedly spirited away and hurried off 
into bondage. Great activity in this work of securing fugitives 
who had lived in the North for years prevailed, and fear and ap- 
prehension took possession of the whole negro population of that 
section, and a corresponding indignation grew hot in the hearts 
of multitudes of freemen. 

Scenes and incidents were continually transpiring and pub- 
lished in the newspapers that stirred the one party to greater 
hatred of the institution of slavery, and the other party to greater 
hatred to the means, regular or irregular, that were employed to 
prevent the carrying out of its purpose. 

As may well be supposed, Mr. Beecher speaks with no 
greater affection for this measure, now that it has become a 
law, than when it was being debated in Congress. 

In a Star paper that appeared October 3, upon " The Fugi- 
tive Slave Bill at its Work," he meets it with undisguised and 
open defiance. " With such solemn convictions no law impious 
to God and humanity shall have respect or observance at our 
hands. If in God's providence fugitives ask bread or shelter, 
raiment or conveyance, from us, my own children shall lack bread 
before they ; my own flesh shall sting with cold ere they shall lack 
raiment ; I will both shelter them, conceal them, or speed their 
flight, and while under my shelter or my convoy they shall be 
to me as my own flesh and blood ; and whatsoever defence I 
would put forth for my own children, that shall these poor, de- 
spised, and persecuted creatures have in my house or upon the 
road." 

He follows with another very thoughtful and able article upon 
" Law and Conscience" in defence of his position, and for the 
instruction of those who were in doubt what course to take in the 
conflicting claims of the law of the land on one side and their 
feelings of humanity upon the other. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 24 1 

In the first place, he makes the duty of obedience to law very- 
strong : 

" Nothing could be more mischievous than the prevalence of 
the doctrine that a citizen may disobey an unjust or burdensome 
law. Should that liberty be granted, the bad, the selfish, the 
cruel and grasping, might disregard wholesome laws as easily as 
just men unjust laws. It would constitute every man a court in 
his own case ; and a court, too, in which selfishness would pre- 
side. Society could not exist for a day. 

; ' It is a question seriously asked by thousands : How can we 
as good citizens subscribe to such wholesome doctrine r.nd yet 
openly resist the Fugitive Slave Law ? Many reasons make it im- 
portant that this question should be thoroughly answered. There 
are thousands who say that this law must be obeyed, and who, 
with the next breath, bravely and generously declare that never- 
theless, should a distressed fugitive ask succor, shelter, and guid- 
ance at their hand, he should have them. But this is breaking 
the law. To keep this law you must not shelter a slave mother 
fleeing to her free husband in the North, nor a slave girl whose 
foot bounds at the sound of a pursuer, as if it were the knell of 
virtue. You must not give direction to a fugitive, though his 
head be white and his old limbs reveal half a century of unre- 
quited toil ; though a man say to you, in the awful agony of his 
soul, ' Kill me, but for the love of God do not betray me ! ' the 
law enjoins you to go with the officer, if he summon you, and 
help in his arrest ! The minister of the Gospel, the humane 
philanthropist, peacefully walking to the Sabbath-sounding bell, 
must turn aside and help some scoundrel hireling to run down 
his slave, if the marshal command him, or break the law ! " 

He then lays down this general principle : 

" Every citizen must obey a law which inflicts injury upon his 
person, estate, and civil privilege, until legally redressed ; but no 
citizen is bound to obey a law which commands him to inflict in- 
jury upon another. We must endure but never conwiit wrong. 
We must be patient when sinned against, but must never sin 
against others. The law may heap injustice upon me, but no law 
can authorize me to pour injustice upon another. When the law 
commanded Daniel not to pray he disobeyed it ; when it com- 
manded him to be cast into the lions' den he submitted. 

" A law which enjoins upon a citizen the commission of a 



24-2 BIOGRAPHY OF 

crime, and still more of an open, disgraceful, and flagitious crime, 
has violated the confidence of the citizen, and is dissolved in the 
court of God the moment it is enacted. 

" Let no man stand uncommitted, dodging between daylight 
and dark, on this vital principle. Let every man firmly and 
openly take sides. This vibrating between humanity for the fu- 
gitive and conscience for the law, this clandestine humanity in 
spite of law, to which the lips only give a sullen and pouting 
obedience, is not consistent with sincerity and open-hearted in- 
tegrity. We adjure every Christian man, every man to whom con- 
science is more than meat, and honor better than thrift, to stand 
forth and enunciate the invincible truth of the Christian's creed : 
Obedience to laws, even though they sin against me : disobedience to 
every law that commands me to sin. " 

His conviction of the origin of this whole trouble, his policy 
concerning it, and his confidence in the working out of natural 
causes are well set forth in an article at this period upon " The 
Cause and Cure of Agitation ": 

" It ought primarily to be understood that our Constitution 
has invited this whole conflict which has raged about it. Had the 
framers been gifted with prescience they would, we cannot but 
think, have regarded the inevitable future mischief of that com- 
promise by which slavery had its rights embedded in a constitu- 
tion of liberty, as too great to be risked. They acted with the 
light which they had. They swaddled and laid in one cradle two 
infant forms. These were rocked together and grew up together; 
but one was a wolf's cub and the other a lamb. Both were alike 
peaceful at birth — for a lion's whelp when first dropped is as gen- 
tle as a doe. Growth brought forth separate natures. Then ap- 
peared hostility. Each acted to its nature. 

" Our policy for the future is plain. All the natural laws of 
God are warring upon slavery. We have only to let the process 
go on. Let slavery alone. Let it go to seed. Hold it to its own 
natural fruit. Cause it to abide by itself. Cut off every branch 
that hangs beyond the wall, every root that spreads. Shut it up 
to itself and let it alone. We do not ask to interfere with the in- 
ternal policy of a single State by Congressional enactments : we 
will not ask to take one guarantee from the institution. We only 
ask that a line be drawn about it ; that an insuperable bank be 
cast up ; that it be fixed and for ever settled that slavery must 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 243 

find no new sources, new fields, new prerogatives, but that it must 
abide in its place, subject to all the legitimate changes which will 
be brought upon it by the spirit of a nation essentially demo- 
cratic, by schools taught by enlightened men, by colleges sending 
annually into every profession thousands bred to justice and hat- 
ing its reverse, by churches preaching a gospel that has always 
heralded civil liberty, by manufactories which always thrive best 
when the masses are free and refined and therefore have their 
wants multiplied, by free agriculture and free commerce. 

" When slavery begins, under such a treatment, to flag, we de- 
mand that she be denied political favoritism to regain her loss ; 
we demand that no laws be enacted to give health to her paraly- 
sis and strength to her relaxing grasp. She boldly and honestly 
demanded a right to equality with the North, and prophetically 
spoke by Calhoun, that the North would preponderate and crush 
her. It is true. Time is her enemy. Liberty will, if let alone, 
always be a match for oppression. Now, it is because statesmen 
propose stepping in between slavery and the appointed bourne to 
which she goes, scourged by God and nature, that we resent these 
statesmen and refuse to follow them. If her wounds can be 
stanched, if she may have adventitious aid in new privileges, sla- 
very will renew her strength and stave off the final day. But if 
it be forbidden one additional favor and be obliged to stand up 
by the side of free labor, free schools, free churches, free institu- 
tions ; if it be obliged to live in a land of free books, free pa- 
pers, and free Bibles, it will either die or else it ought to live." 

He ridicules those measures that had been adopted North 
and South to enforce the peace, and compares those who keep 
agitating against agitation to poor old " crazy Dinah ' 5 who used 
to sit on the pulpit stairs in Litchfield. u Once she began talk- 
ing, but, startled at her want of manners, she said out loud : 
' Why, I'm talking ! I'm talking in meetin' ? There, I spoke 
again. I ought not to speak. There, I spoke once more. Tut, 
tut ! why, I keep a-speaking.' " 

While advocating at this time, as ever afterwards, the ut- 
most liberty of discussion, he stated his creed in these words : 
" There is nothing so safe in a free country as free discussion, 
nothing so dangerous as the suppression of it ; peace and liberty 
of speech, violence and intolerance, respectively go together." 

He argued and advised in a lengthy paper against " the usual 



244 BIOGRAPHY OF 

unfortunate concomitants of controversy, bitterness, railing, un- 
fairness, and exaggerated prejudices. 

" We have not the least objection to the most unbounded 
ardor of expression, to the most enthusiastic convictions, ex- 
pressed in the most positive manner, so long as they relate to 
truths ox principles. But when the propagandist comes to regard 
those who do not receive his views as devoid of all principle and 
necessarily dishonest, and becomes offensively personal, then con- 
troversy is morbid and mischievous. And as nothing gives such 
vigor to like or dislike as conscience, so they who profess to be 
conscientious are often conscientiously bitter. There is no re- 
vulsion against men or measures so violent as that of pure and 
honorable men. A man consciously right should watch against 
severe judgments of others. It is sad and curious to observe the 
progress of exaggerated impressions of personal character. Those 
who do not follow our conscience on the slavery question are 
often, nevertheless, on the whole, more conscientious men than 
we. Those whose reasonings we pronounce cold and inhuman are 
not cold or inhuman men. Those whose commercial interests 
reduce them, as it seems to us, to a policy on this particular ques- 
tion which outrages justice and rectitude, are in their private 
character most estimable for truth, and even for tender sympathy. 
Indeed, this is often shown in strange contrast ; for the very men 
who give their counsel and zeal and money against the unseen 
slave of the South irresistibly pity the particular fugitive whom 
they may see running through the North. They give the Union 
Committee money to catch the slave, and give the slave money to 
escape from the Committee." 

All who were acquainted with Mr. Beecher know that the 
course he advised for others he persistently and conscientiously 
pursued himself. We doubt if any man ever lived who was en- 
gaged in so many severe battles and carried into them or brought 
from them so little bitterness. 

Such a vigorous treatment of large and vital questions com- 
manded a following ; and it was not long before this young minis- 
ter from the West was recognized as one of the great anti- slavery 
leaders and had a national reputation. Men at the South began 
to hate him ; men at the North, conservatives whose business 
interests were wrapped up in the present state of things, whose 
goods and principles were equally for sale in Southern mar- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 245 

kets, were horrified and alarmed at his unwise sayings, his blas- 
phemous use of the pulpit for political ends, and his fiery de- 
nunciations of the nation's pet institution. But over against 
these there was another class, daily growing larger, whose con- 
sciences were set free by his clear discrimination of a citizen's 
and a Christian's duty, whose intelligence was broadened and 
enlarged by his lofty views, and whose hearts were set on fire by 
his mighty enthusiasm and abounding love. This body daily in- 
creased in numbers and came more and more to share the spirit of 
their leader. Whatever he wrote they read. Whenever he spoke 
the size of church or hall alone decided the number of hearers. 
Without ambition, without self-seeking, with a simple, earnest 
desire to do his work as God revealed it to him, unrasped by 
hatreds, he had come to a place and leadership as broad and 
high as there was in the land. With cheek still ruddy with 
youth, with eyes from which the laughter never died out except 
when the tears of sympathy filled them or the deep things of 
God veiled them, with a heart that was in sympathy with all 
nature round him, and which nature and He who is above 
nature fed with perennial freshness, with a voice that could in- 
terpret every emotion, with that excellent health that makes the 
body a perfect channel of expression for the mind and a com- 
plete instrument for its service, he stands like a David just come 
from his sheepfolds, free, unencumbered, and singing as he 
strikes. 

In the progress of this discussion upon the Compromise mea- 
sures, which had its centre in Congress, but in which every ham- 
let, almost every household, in the North had a share, other ques- 
tions came to the front as parts of the great controversy. 

Among the earliest of these was the right of free speech 
— a right utterly unknown where slavery was in power, and al- 
ways bitterly attacked where it had influence. As may well be 
expected, it found in Mr. Beecher one of its most strenuous 
champions. Early in his career he urged all the claims of 
friendship, risked the safety of his new church building, and 
defied the New York and Brooklyn mob, then under the control 
of the notorious Captain Rynders, in its defence. 

In a sermon preached in 1884 upon the death of Wendell 
Phillips he gives an account of his experience in this matter : 

" It is a part of the sweet and pleasant memories of my 



546 BIOGRAPHY OF 

comparative youth here that when the mob refused to let him 
speak in the Broadway Tabernacle before it was moved up-town, 
William A. Hall, now dead — a fervent friend and Abolitionist — 
had secured the Graham Institute, on Washington Street, in 
Brooklyn, wherein to hold a meeting where Mr. Phillips should 
be heard. I had agreed to pray at the opening of the meeting. 
On the morning of the day on which it was to have taken place 
I was visited by the committee of that Institute (excellent gentle- 
men, whose feelings will not be hurt, because they are all now 
ashamed of it : they are in heaven), who said that, in consequence 
of the great peril that attended a meeting at the Institute, they 
had withdrawn the liberty to use it and paid back the money, 
and that they called simply to say that it was out of no disrespect 
to me, but from fidelity to their supposed trust. Well, it was a 
bitter thing. If there is anything on earth that I am sensitive to 
it is the withdrawing of the liberty of speech and thought. Henry 
C. Bowen said to me : ' You can have Plymouth Church, if you 
want it.' ' How ? ' ' It is a rule of the church trustees that 
the church may be let by a majority vote when we are con- 
vened ; but if we are not convened, then every trustee must 
give his consent in writing. If you choose to make it a personal 
matter and go to every trustee, you can have it.' He meanwhile 
undertook, with Mr. Hall, to put new placards over the old ones, 
notifying men quietly that the meeting was to be held here, and 
distributing thousands and tens of thousands of hand-bills at 
the ferries. No task was ever more welcome. I went to the 
trustees man by man. The majority of them very cheerfully ac- 
corded the permission. One or two of them were disposed to 
decline and withhold it. I made it a matter of personal friend- 
ship : ' You and I will break if you don't give me this permis- 
sion,' and they signed. So the meeting glided from Graham 
Institute to this house. A great audience assembled. We had 
detectives in disguise, and every arrangement made to handle 
the subject in a practical form if the crowd should undertake to 
molest us." 

Neither at this nor any other time was an attack actually made 
upon Plymouth Church, although many times in its history have 
angry men gathered in the immediate neighborhood, evidently 
bent on mischief, but were restrained from violence by the 
bold bearing of many in the audience who were known not to be 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 247 

Quakers, and by the presence of the police, who were kept well 
informed of their intentions. 

Another of the secondary battles that were fought early in 
this year was one for commercial liberty. 

The South, by the help, and perhaps by the instigation, of 
Northern co-operators, attempted nothing less than to boycott 
every commercial or manufacturing company that was opposed 
to them upon the' great political questions of the day. A great 
" Union Saving Committee " was formed in New York, and met 
in Castle Garden and made out a black-list of the merchants that 
were anti-slavery, from whom the South were to withdraw their 
patronage. Mr. Beech er not only preached against the outrage, 
but visited from store to store to uphold the courage of the mer- 
chants. 

He says : " Mr. Bowen was, of course, included in that black- 
list, and threatened with the loss of all his Southern custom. He 
came to me and asked me if I would not write a card for him, 
and I undertook to do it ; but, my head not running very clear, 
the only thing I got at, after making three or four attempts, was, 
'My goods are for sale, but not my principles,' but I could not 
lick it into shape, and I gave the paper to him and said, ( You 
must fix it yourself.' He took it to Hiram Barney, and he drew 
up the card in the shape in which it appeared, including that 
sentence, which was the snap of the whole thing." 

" My goods are for sale, but not my principles " became a 
war-cry for the independent business men of the day, and had 
immense influence upon commercial action. 

He fought the petty ostracism of the North, and apparently 
with success ; 

" I never preached on that subject. I never said to the peo- 
ple in this congregation, from the beginning to this day, 'You 
ought to let colored folks sit in your pew.' I preached the dig- 
nity of man as a child of God, and lifted up the sanctity of 
human life and nature before the people. They made the appli- 
cation, and they made it wisely and well. 

" When I came here there was no place for colored men and 
women in the theatre except the negro pen ; no place in the 
opera ; no place in the church except the negro pew ; no place 
in any lecture-hall ; no place in the first-class car on the railways. 
The white omnibus of Fulton Ferry would not allow colored per- 



248 BIOGRAPHY OF 

sons to ride in it. They were never allowed to sit even in the 
gentlemen's cabin on the boats. 

" I invited Fred Douglass, one day in those times, to come to 
church here. ' I should be glad to, sir,' said he ; ' but it would 
be so offensive to your congregation.' ' Mr. Douglass, will you 
come ? And if any man objects to it, come up and sit on my 
platform by me. You will always be welcome there." 

" At the Fulton Ferry there are two lines of omnibuses, one 
white and the other blue. I had been accustomed to go in them 
indifferently ; but one day I saw a little paper stuck upon one of 
them, saying : ' Colored people not allowed to ride in this omni- 
bus.' I instantly got out. There are men who stand at the door 
of these omnibus lines, urging passengers into one or the other. 
I am very well known to all of them ; and the next day, when I 
came to the place, the gentleman serving asked ; ' Won't you ride, 
sir ? ' ' No,' I said ; ' I am too much of a negro to ride in that 
omnibus.' I called the attention of every one I met to that fact, 
and said to them : ' Don't ride in that omnibus, which violates 
your principles, and my principles, and common decency at the 
same time.' I do not know whether this had any influence, but 
I do know that after a fortnight's time I had occasion to look in 
and the placard was gone." 

But perhaps the most important, at all events the hardest- 
fought, battle of this era was in behalf of the liberty of ministers 
of the Gospel to preach in their pulpits for the slave and against 
the atrocities of slavery. 

It sprang from the publication, by an influential New York 
daily paper, of an article in which it was threatened that clergy- 
men who spoke in their pulpits upon slavery "would have their 
coats rolled in the dirt." Mr. Beecher at once took up the glove 
in his own defence and that of his brethren who thought it their 
duty to preach on this subject. He entered into an examination 
of the whole status of the slave with great thoroughness, and gath- 
ered his materials for defence and attack from Southern sources. 
A report made to the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia in 
1833 says : " They have no Bible to read by their own firesides ; 
they have no family altars ; and when in affliction, sickness, or 
death, they have no minister to address to them the consolations 
of the Gospel. 

" They are destitute of the privileges of the Gospel, and ever 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 249 

will be, under the present state of things. They may justly be 
considered the heathen of this country, and will bear a compari- 
son with heathen in any country in the world." 

" Says Judge Ruffin, of North Carolina, in a case brought 
against defendant for shooting and wounding a woman who en- 
deavored to run away from a whipping : i With slavery it is far 
otherwise. The end is the profit of the master, his security, and 
the public peace. The subject is one doomed in his own person 
and in his posterity to live without knowledge, and without ca- 
pacity to make anything his own, and to toil that others may reap 
the fruits.' " 

Aroused by such testimony from reports of religious bodies 
and the decisions of the courts, he exclaims, with hot indigna- 
tion : 

" Yet the pulpit, whose echoes roll over the heathenism of the 
globe, must be dumb ! 

" It is vain to tell us that hundreds of thousands of slaves are 
church-members ; does that save women from the lust of their 
owners ? does it save their children from being sold ? does it save 
parents from separation ? In the shameless processions every 
week made from the Atlantic to the Gulf are to be found slaves 
ordained to preach the Gospel, members of churches, baptized 
children, Sunday-school scholars carefully catechised, full of Gos- 
pel texts, fat and plump for market. What is religion worth to 
a slave, except as a consolation from despair when the hand that 
breaks to him the bread of communion on Sunday takes the 
price of his blood and bones on Monday, and bids him God- 
speed on his pilgrimage from old Virginia tobacco-fields to the 
cotton-plantations of Alabama? 

" What is church fellowship, and church privilege, and church 
instruction worth if the recipient is still as much a beast, just as 
little loved, just as ruthlessly desolated of his family, just as 
coolly sold, as if he were without God and without hope ? What 
motive is there to the slave to strive for Christian graces, when, 
if they make him a real man, they are threshed out of him ; or, if 
they make him a more obedient and faithful man, raise his mar- 
ket price and only make him a more merchantable disciple of 
Christ ? It is the religious phase of slave-life that reveals the 
darkest features of that all-perverting system." 

Ridiculing the idea that it takes distance to make a topic fit 



25O BIOGRAPHY OF 

for the pulpit, and upbraiding the ministry, who are engaged in 
snatching here and there a child from the Ganges, and have no 
words for those children that, here at home, every year are 
snatched from the parents' bosom and sold everywhither, he 
says : 

" It requires distance, it seems, to make a topic right for the 
pulpit. Send it to Greenland or to Nootka Sound, and you may 
then practise at the far-away target. And the reason of such 
discrimination seems to be that preaching against foreign sins 
does not hurt the feelings nor disturb the quiet of your congre- 
gation ; whereas, if the identical evils at home which we deplore 
upon the Indus or along the Burampootra are preached about, 
the Journal says that it will risk the minister's place and bread 
and butter ; and it plainly tells all Northern ministers that if they 
meddle with such politics they will have their coats rolled in the 
dirt. Will the Journal tell us how many leagues off a sin must 
be before it is prudent and safe for courageous ministers to 
preach against it ? 

* Every year thousands of women are lashed for obstinate 
virtue, and tens of thousands robbed of what they have never been 
taught to prize, and the Journal stands poised to cast its javelin 
at that meddlesome pulpit that dares speak of such boundless li- 
centiousness, and send it to its more appropriate work of evangel- 
izing the courtesans of Paris or the loose virtue of Italy ! And it 
assures us that multitudes of clergymen are thanking it for such 
a noble stand. Some of those clergymen we know. The plat- 
forms of our benevolent societies resound with their voices, 
urging Christianity to go abroad, stimulating the Church not to 
leave a corner of the globe unsearched nor an evil unredressed. 
But when the speech is ended they steal in behind the Journal to 
give it thanks for its noble stand against the right of the pulpit to 
say a word about home-heathen — about their horrible ignorance, 
bottomless licentiousness, and about the mercenary inhumanity 
which every week is selling their own Christian brethren, baptized 
as much as they, often preachers of the Gospel like themselves, 
eating from the "same table of the Lord, praying to the same 
Saviour, listening to snatches of that same Bible (whose letters 
they have never been permitted to learn), out of which these 
reverend endorsers of the Journal preach ! " 

He shows that the slavery of New England never was the 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 25 I 

slavery of the South : " The slavery of the South in our day 
adopts the Roman civil law as the basis of its code. . . . Now, 
New England never held a slave on the basis of the Roman civil 
law, but under a law which was expressly enacted for the benefit 
of the slave and for the ultimate destruction of slavery — viz., the 
Hebrew law of slavery. No system of slavery, in this land, can 
be profitable which does not put the slave under a regimen 
which denies him the rights of manhood. The North, on the 
basis of the Hebrew slavery law, found it out ; she refused to go 
further and sacrifice her religious scruples. The South, on the 
basis of the Roman civil law, imbibed its inhuman spirit, put on 
the screws, and forced the system into its present legal attitude, 
with a written code more infamous than the unwritten law of any 
pirate's deck." 

He proves that the North never sold out her slaves, with a 
profit, to "her partners in the South, and so closed up the busi- 
ness," by showing that in most of the Northern States the slaves 
were set free by the decisions of the courts upon the adoption 
of the State constitutions, and that in the meantime their masters 
were forbidden, under heavy penalties, to sell them South. 

In New York gradual emancipation was enacted, and not 
only was the sale of slaves out of the borders forbidden, but 
masters travelling with their slaves in the South were required to 
give heavy bonds for the safe return of the same. 

These words reveal his own spirit in the discussion: 

" In exploring this wilderness of inhumanity, filled with the 
shapes and motley sights of degradation, I live in a perpetual 
struggle how to calm the natural expressions of an honest soul 
into that measured phrase that may best suit the sated public 
ear. If one overhang this abyss until his spirit do drink in 
its very import, his soul must be full of thunder and his words 
glance like fire. Neither are these feelings the foul engenderings 
of fanaticism. They are the true feelings of a heart taught to hate 
injustice and degrading wrong, by that nature which God gave it ; 
by the Bible which educated it ; by the law under which it was 
made, and by the public sentiment in which it has been bred. It 
is with a sense of shame that we see strong words for oppression 
granted an unapologized liberty to walk up and down as they 
will ; while he who speaks for freedom must rake up his ardor 
under the ashes of a tame propriety, and stand to answer for 



252 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

want of a Gospel spirit if indignation at double and treble 
wrongs do sometimes give forth a bolt ! Nevertheless, we hope ; 
we trust ; we pray; and hoping, trusting, and praying, we 
soothe ourselves in such thoughts as these: 'From this shame, 
too, thou shalt go forth, O world ! God, who, unwearied sitting 
on the circle of the earth, hath beheld and heard the groanings 
and travairings of pain until now, and caused Time to destroy 
them one by one, shall ere long destroy thee, thou abhorred and 
thrice damnable oppression cancerously eating the breasts of 
liberty.' " 

He concludes by giving his views upon the position of the 
pulpit, and utters this solemn protest : 

"Therefore, against every line of the Coward's Ethics of the 
Journal we solemnly protest, and declare a minister made to its 
pattern fitter to be sent to the pyramids and tombs of Egypt 
to preach to old-world mummies than to be a living man 
of God among living men, loving them but never fearing them ! 
God be thanked that in every age hitherto pulpits have been 
found, the allies of suffering virtue, the champions of the op- 
pressed ! And if in this day, after the notable examples of 
heroic men in heroic ages, when life itself often paid for 
fidelity, the pulpit is to be mined and sapped by insincere 
friends and insidious enemies, and learn to mix the sordid pru- 
dence of business with the sonorous and thrice heroic counsels 
of Christ, then, O my soul, be not thou found conspiring with 
this league of iniquity ; that so, when in that august day of 
retribution God shall deal punishment in flaming measures to 
all hireling and coward ministers, thou shalt not go down, under 
double-bolted thunders, lower than miscreant Sodom or thrice- 
polluted Gomorrah ! " 

Some idea of his mode of address and quickness in retort at 
that day will appear from extracts from his speech at the annual 
meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and 
two incidents that occurred at this meeting. Mr. Beecher an- 
swered the Scriptural argument for the return of fugitives, based 
on the return of Onesimus, in this manner : " There are two ways 
of sending fugitives back into slavery. One is the way Paul 
sent back the slave Onesimus. Now, if people will adopt that 
way I will not object. In the first place, he instructed him in 
Christianity and led him to become a Christian ; then he wrote a 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 253 

letter and sent it by Onesimus himself. Now, I should like to see 

Marshal or Marshal somebody else, of this city, send back 

a slave in this way. In the first place, the marshal would take 
him and teach him the catechism, and pray with him, and convert 
him, and then write a letter to his master telling him to receive 
him as a brother beloved ; and then the slave goes of his own 
free will to his master, and walks into the house, and, with his 
broad, black, beaming face, says : ' How d'ye do, my brother ? 
and how d'ye do, my sister?' " The broad, beaming face which 
he himself wore as he described this scene and personated this 
character was irresistibly comical, and nothing more was heard in 
that quarter of Paul's return of fugitives. 

It was in this speech that, in describing the situation of the 
slave, he says : 

" They are married and separated in the South until perhaps 
they have twenty wives." [A voice: "There are men in New 
York City who have twenty wives."] " I am sorry for them," he 
answered at once. " I go for their immediate emancipation ! " 

He read extracts from the law as laid down by some of the 
able members of the Southern bench in South Carolina and 
Louisiana, to show that slaves are mere goods and chattels. 

" The slave," he exclaimed, " is made just good enough to be 
a good slave and no more. It is a penitentiary offence to teach 
him more." 

Here a person among a group in one corner of the gallery ex- 
claimed: "It's a lie!" 

" Well, whether it's a penitentiary offence or not, I shall not 
argue with the gentleman in the corner, as doubtless he has been 
there and ought to know." 

Such was the voice that began to attract attention throughout 
the whole land. It was as truthful and earnest as that of the old 
Abolitionists, but took in a broader range of subjects and was 
inspired by a higher spirit than theirs ; it was as politic in its ut- 
terances as that of the prince of politicians, Martin Van Buren, 
but it was the policy of right and justice ; it had in it the strength 
of Webster's, but argued from truer premises than he ; it was 
as popular as Henry Clay's, but its sympathy was broader than 
his ; it was the voice of Henry Ward Beecher as he stood in the 
early maturity of his powers, aflame with Christian love and 
patriotism, preaching the Gospel of the Son of God, the Deliverer 



2 54 BIOGRAPHY OF 

and Saviour for slave and master, for North and South, for com- 
merce and manufactures, for our whole land from shame and 
thraldom. 

The need of such a voice will appear if we consider the state 
of things at this time, as he himself described it : 

" ' An Abolitionist ' was enough to put the mark of Cain upon 
any young man that arose in my early day, and until I was forty 
years of age it was punishable to preach on the subject of liberty. 
It was enough to expel a man from church communion if he in- 
sisted on praying in the prayer-meeting for the liberation of the 
slaves. I am speaking the words of truth and soberness. The 
Church was dumb in the North, but not in the West. A marked 
distinction exists between the history of the New School of Pres- 
byterian churches in the West and the Congregational churches, 
the Episcopal churches, the Methodist and Baptist churches in 
the North and East. The great publishing societies that were 
sustained by the contributions of the churches were absolutely 
dumb. Great controversies raged round about the doors of the 
Bible Society, of the Tract Society, and of the American Board 
of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The managers of these 
societies resorted to every shift except that of sending the Gospel 
to the slaves. They would not send the Bible to the South ; for, 
they said, ' it is a punishable offence in most of the Southern 
States to teach a slave to read ; and are we to go in the face of 
this State legislation and send the Bible South ? ' The Tract 
Society said : ■ We are set up to preach the Gospel, not to meddle 
with political and industrial institutions.' And so they went on 
printing tracts against tobacco and its uses, tracts against dancing 
and its abuses, and refusing to print a tract that had a shadow of 
criticism on slavery ! 

" One of the most disgraceful things took place under the 
jurisdiction of Bishop Doane, of New Jersey — I take it for grant- 
ed, without his knowledge. I have the book. It was an edition 
of the Episcopal prayer-book. They had put into the front of it 
a steel engraving of Ary Scheffer's * Christus Consolator ' — Christ 
the Consoler. There was a semi-circle around about the benefi- 
cent and aerial figure of our Saviour — the poor, the old, the sick, 
the mother with her dead babe, bowed in grief ; every known 
form of human sorrow belonged to the original design and pic- 
ture, and among others a fettered slave, with his hands lifted to 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 255 

heaven, praying for liberty. But this was too much ; and so they 
cut out the slave, and left the rest of the picture, and bound it 
into the Episcopal prayer-book of New Jersey. I have a copy 
of it, which I mean to leave to the Historical Society of Brooklyn 
when I am done using it. 

" These things are important as showing the incredible con- 
dition of public sentiment at that time. If a man came to be 
known as an anti-slavery man it almost preluded bankruptcy 
in business." 

After the intense excitement, within and without Congress, 
upon the discussion and the passage of the Compromise measures 
of 1850, a reaction followed, and the year 185 1 is, in many re- 
spects, a marked contrast to that immediately preceding. The 
people, in the main, tired of the discussion and the consequent 
turmoil, thankful for their escape, as they thought, from the 
threatened danger of the dissolution of the Union, were deter- 
mined to preserve the peace that had been won, and frowned 
upon everything that endangered its continuance. Public meet- 
ings and conventions, held for the expression of free-State senti- 
ments, were regarded with great disfavor and often broken up by 
mob violence. 

Four millions of people in a Christian land were denied every 
right belonging to them, not only on the ground of Christianity 
but of humanity, and yet they must be dumb. The pulpit, which 
represented Him who came to set the captive free and preach the 
Gospel to the poor, on this great matter must utter no voice. 
Statesmanship must see consummated an utter perversion of the 
fundamental principles and policy of the nation, and yet offer no 
protest. A common humanity, outraged by the atrocities com- 
mitted against a fellow human being, must be silent or join in the 
hue and cry for the capture of the unhappy victim. 

This was the programme that conservatism, through the press, 
in the pulpit, by the ballot-box, through business patronage, so- 
cial frowns or favors, and not unfrequently through mob violence, 
attempted to execute. It was as vain as to try to still the voice 
of Niagara or the noise of the breakers upon the coast. 

One thing more powerful than any other contributed to pre- 
vent a complete reaction and consequent stagnation upon this 
subject — the activity of the South in availing itself of the advan- 
tages offered by the Fugitive Slave Bill for obtaining possession 



256 BIOGRAPHY OF 

of the property that had escaped and was living on Northern 
soil. The year 1851 was emphatically a year of slave- hunting. 
And since these refugees from labor had, many of them, lived for 
years at the North, had become respectable citizens and reared 
families, their violent capture invariably occasioned, if not force- 
ful resistance, at least deep and bitter indignation. 

The quiet of 1851 was not perfect and it could not be made 
permanent. It was only the lull which weariness compels in 
every hard-fought battle. 

In December of this year Kossuth visited this country at the 
invitation of the Senate, coming in a government steamer sent to 
Asia especially for his conveyance. Many things contributed to 
awaken immense enthusiasm for him. He had represented Hun- 
gary in the Austrian Diet ; had championed the liberty of free 
press and free speech so fearlessly as to gain the honor of an Aus- 
trian dungeon ; had been elected governor of Hungary, and for 
two years had waged successful war with Austria. Overcome by 
the immense military power of that great empire in alliance with 
Russia, he had been forced into exile with a price set upon his 
head. He represented, in that year of European revolutions, the 
struggles of the common people for liberty. These experiences, 
united with his personal appearance and marvellous eloquence, 
combined to secure for him a most enthusiastic reception by 
the people of this country. The Senate, on the other hand, were 
far more chary of their welcome. The Hungarian exile stood 
for universal liberty, and that was just what at that time the 
Senate of the United States were most interested in suppress- 
ing. However, though granted no reception, a banquet was 
given in his honor, at which most of our public men were pre- 
sent, and Daniel Webster, Secretary of State, delivered the prin- 
cipal address. 

Quick to perceive the dilemma in which Congress found 
itself, and eager that the nation at large should appreciate it, Mr. 
Beecher writes a Star Paper in which, in his usual happy and 
effective style, he describes the incongruity in the action of our 
government in welcoming this fugitive from the oppression of 
the Old World while we are engaged in remanding to their op- 
pressors fugitives in the New. 

Invited by Mr. Beecher, Kossuth delivered an address in 
Plymouth Church in behalf of the cause of Hungarian liberty. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



257 



So great was the eagerness of the people to hear him that some 
ten thousand dollars were realized from the sale of tickets. 

So did the pastor of this church link himself with the cause 
of freedom all over the earth. 

Fifty-two, being " election year," saw efforts more persistent, 
if possible, than ever before to regard the Compromise measures 
as a finality and discourage all agitation of the subject of slavery. 
A public pledge was signed by more than fifty senators, among 
them the most influential from both the great parties, including 
Henry Clay, agreeing that they would thereafter support no can- 
didate who did not approve and promise to abide by the provi- 
sions of that compact. Both the great parties of the day — the 
Whig and Democratic — put into their platforms resolutions de- 
claring that the above Compromise was accepted as a final 
settlement of the questions at issue, and agreed to resist all 
attempts at renewing the agitation of the slavery question 
under any pretext whatsoever. In the election Franklin Pierce, 
who had but two qualifications for the office of chief magistrate 
— he was a gentleman and a radical pro-slavery man — was chosen 
by an overwhelming majority for President, for the reason that 
his party affiliations gave the best assurance that the pledges 
which all had alike made would in his case be fulfilled. 

General Scott and the Whig party made just as profound an 
obeisance to the slave-power, and offered just as heavy a bid 
for its favors ; but there was not the same confidence in their 
ability to perform the service demanded as in that of their 
Democratic rivals, and they were in consequence disastrously 
defeated. So did the popular vote upon its first opportunity 
endorse the action of Congress and declare that discussion on 
this great matter was closed. Yet, in spite of the verdict of the 
ballot-box, in spite of resolutions, compacts, and threats, agita- 
tion still went on. Mr. Beecher explains the phenomenon : 

" Politicians inquire whence is the tenacity of life of the 
anti-slavery movement. It is not fanaticism that animates or 
controls it, it is the religious principle that is the secret of the 
strength of this cause ; it is because Jesus Christ is alive, and 
there are Jesus Christ men who count this cause dearer than their 
lives." 

In the summer and autumn of 1852 Mr. Beecher was engaged 
in what was called " The Parker Controversy." 



258 BIOGRAPHY OF 

We have no desire to open anew the bitterness of those old 
matters which have passed so long ago into history, and almost 
into forgetfulness, but no biography of the man would be complete 
without a reference to this trial, the severest which he had thus 
far endured, and which prepared him for other and greater ones 
to come. In our study of the character and disposition of 
Henry Ward Beecher we find him, as we believe, to have been 
pre-eminently a man of peace. In his history we see him almost 
continuously engaged in war. This anomaly is easily explained. 
It was not from desire or disposition, but a necessary conse- 
quence of the progress which he was making and the position 
which he occupied. The age was moving forward : wrongs must 
be overcome, new positions of advantage must be gained. By 
the habit of his mind, the intuitions of his genius, and the 
earnestness and simplicity of his purpose he found himself a 
leader in this progress. 

While others stopped to discover the truth by laborious study 
in their libraries, he found it among the results of former re- 
searches, derived it intuitively from well-admitted principles, or 
gathered it from the people with whom he associated by the way. 
While others were carefully weighing the consequences of. their 
actions, he, trusting in God, in the righteousness of his cause, 
in the forces of nature and in himself, stepped forward to the 
front. While others were laboriously forging their speeches his 
sprang like the fabled Minerva from the brain of Jupiter, alive, 
armed, and beautiful. He came into battle for the same reason 
that the head of a column advancing to seize a favorable position 
within the enemy's lines is early brought under fire, or that a 
heavy field-battery, which is sending its shot with deadly effect 
into the ranks of the enemy, is attacked. 

In his discussion with a New York daily, of which we have 
already spoken, he had come in conflict with the commercial 
spirit of the day which held its principles and its goods both for 
sale, and against it had defended the right of the pulpit to dis- 
cuss the live topics of the hour. This had drawn fire. Men who 
had been scored as he scored them in a Star Paper of January 
24, 1850, entitled "A Man in the Market" — ". . . They hang 
themselves up in the shambles of every Southern market ; they 
trust the pliant good nature of the North, and are only fearful 
lest they should fail to be mean enough to please the South" — and 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECJIER. 259 

who deserved the scoring, would not be likely to forget it soon or 
forgive it readily. The conflict in which he now became engaged 
was more painful than the former, for it was waged with Chris- 
tian brethren. Beginning as a skirmish, it became a general bat- 
tle, in which the conservatism of the Church, which had expur- 
gated its religious tracts, curbed the religious press, and toned 
down the utterances of the pulpit, so as not to hurt the feelings 
of slave-holders, was engaged and brought to judgment. 

It came about in this way : In " Uncle Tom's Cabin " Mrs. 
Stowe had described the sale of a child taken from the arms of 
the mother, and of Tom's feeling on the subject. " To him it 
looked like something unutterably horrible and cruel, because, 
poor, ignorant black soul ! he had not learned to generalize and 
take in large views. If he had only been instructed by cer- 
tain ministers of Christianity he might have thought better of 
it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a lawful trade — 
a trade which is the vital support of an institution which some 
American divines tell us has no evils but such as are insepa- 
rable from any other relations in social and domestic life." 

In a note she refers to Dr. Joel Parker by name as the man 
who had given utterance to these sentiments, and as representing 
the class which entertained them. The words, " No evils but 
such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and 
domestic life," had been printed as his in a discussion which he 
had held in Philadelphia, had gone the rounds of the papers as 
his and had been printed and commented upon in England, 
and he had never denied that they rightfully belonged to him. 
But the quickened moral feeling which followed the publication 
of " Uncle Tom's Cabin " made the authorship of such senti- 
ments less pleasant than formerly, and Dr. Parker suddenly dis- 
covered that he had been wronged in having these words ascribed 
to him, and threatened Mrs. Stowe with a suit for libel. A friend 
of his lawyer visited her brother Henry, and suggested that 
this matter could be arranged without a law-suit. With a 
confidence that was born of sincerity and inexperience, the 
brother attempts that most difficult role — that of peace-maker. 
He visits Dr. Parker, becomes satisfied that his language is 
capable of a less violent construction than had been put upon 
it, confers with Mrs. Stowe and finds her ready to take the 
most favorable view of the case possible, bears a letter from 



260 BIOGRAPHY OF 

her to the doctor, writes and discusses with him the answer which 
he shall make, forwards Mrs. Stowe's letter, which had been 
somewhat changed in the discussion, to her for approval— 
which being gained, he publishes both letters over the united 
signatures of the two parties, and goes off to Indiana on a lectur- 
ing trip, with the happy consciousness that he has done a good 
thing. Never was a man waked from a sweeter dream to a 
more bitter disappointment. Instead of making peace between 
them, he found, as a result of his labors, their differences 
increased and embittered, and himself charged with forgery both 
of letter and signature. Offended professional pride, newspa- 
per rivalry, the hatred of men who had been lashed by his tongue 
and pen, the fears of conservatives and the bitter hatred of 
pro-slavery men, suddenly united their forces for his destruc- 
tion. This young radical had left himself open to attack, and 
they all rushed to the ^onset or stood back and cheered others 
on, and were already beginning to rejoice in his downfall. The 
lead in the attack soon passed out of the doctor's hands into 
those of more able and less scrupulous men, and aimed at no- 
thing less than his annihilation. " The arrow was well shot," he 
said ; " had I been unshielded it would have done its work, for 
the point was poisoned." But he was not unshielded ! the over- 
throw was not accomplished, and he stood, at the end, fully vindi- 
cated from all the aspersions of his enemies. 

In a long, carefully written article over his own name he gives 
the whole beginning, continuance, and end of this unhappy mat- 
ter : 

" For myself I profess that no event of my life, not the loss of 
my own children nor bereavements of friends most dear, have 
ever filled me with so deep a sorrow as that which I have in be- 
ing made a party to a public dispute when three of the parties 
concerned are ministers of the Gospel, and when the fourth is a 
woman and the wife of a clergyman. At the very best it is a 
shame and a disgrace. To avert it I labored most honestly and 
with all my might." 

He closes with these words : 

" I commit this narrative to the sober judgment of all good 
men, and myself I commit to the charge of Almighty God." 

"Henry Ward Beecher." 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 26 1 

Two letters selected from the voluminous correspondence of 
that time, one to a friend who approved, and the other to one 
who condemned, his course, are given, that the spirit which he 
cherished may be more thoroughly understood : 

"Brooklyn, Oct. 12, 1852. 
" Barnabas Bates, Esq. : 

" Dear Sir : Your kind letter gave me much pleasure, not as 
adding anything to that quiet which belongs to a conscience void 
of offence, but as showing that I have been able to manifest to 
others that which was undoubted truth to me. It is very pain- 
ful to be placed before the public as I have been, even when the 
verdict is ultimately favorable ; for there is something repugnant 
to one's feelings even to feel it possible that a suspicion of his 
honor could be for a moment entertained. 

" But I am sure that I should be the most ungrateful of men 
if I failed to recognize the presence and abundant blessing of my 
God in all the passages of this painful experience. 

" Not a promise made to me has been left unfulfilled, and I 
know that it has been a better sermon to me than was ever 
preached by human lips. 

' Toward the parties of this wrong much must be allowed to 
wounded vanity, much to partisanship, something perhaps to for- 
getfulness. After all this, however, the rest will be a burden to 
their conscience whenever they shall hereafter look back upon it. 
And while I do most heartily forgive them, and could with ear- 
nest good-will do either of them a kindness, I cannot refrain from 
thanksgiving that I was the accused, not the accuser. Your kind- 
ness I have felt the more because personally (although not 
otherwise) a stranger to me, and because, coming among the first 
letters of sympathy, it has been the harbinger of great kindnesses, 
similar in kind, from many. 

* I am, with sincere esteem, 

" Gratefully yours, 

" H. W. Beecher." 

"Brooklyn, Oct. 12, 1852. 
il Richard Hale, Esq.: 

" Dear Sir : I was for a moment pained by the reading of 
your note this morning, and but for a moment ; for it has pleased 



262 BIOGRAPHY OF 

God to grant Himself to me in such measure that neither, the 
wrath of enemies, nor the strife of tongues, nor the unadvised 
blows of friends have power to do me harm or unsettle my peace. 
Had I ever doubted the promises of God I should now find every 
shadow swept away; and I surely count the little annoyance 
which this perversion of honor and truth in these unprincipled 
men has caused me not worthy to be mentioned in the joy which 
I have had in being folded into the very bosom of my Saviour. 

" All that I can ask in your behalf is that when the day of 
trouble shall come to you (with as little fault on your part as this 
on mine) God may sustain you by that certainty of integrity and 
that consciousness of honor which have given me unspeakable 
comfort, and would were I this day standing before God's judg- 
ment-seat. I 

" I do not blame you ; I believe that you meant me no un- 
kindness ; but it is manifest that with your present views it would 
be as painful for you to associate with me as it would be im- 
possible for me to permit it. 

" Whenever the evil impressions which have tempted you into 
misjudgments shall have passed away (and they assuredly will), 
and when my righteousness shall shine forth as the light (and God 
will bring it forth), then you will find me unchanged in my affec- 
tions for you ; nor shall I then remember anything but that you 
were once my friend. 

" I am, with God's unwavering support, and with the patience 
and peace which Christ only can give, 

" Truly your brother, 

" Henry Ward Beecher." 

Also we give extracts from a third : 

"Brooklyn, October 12, 1852. 
" R. W. Landis : 

" Dear Sir : Your welcome letter I received this morning. It 
gave me great pleasure, though [ did not need it for my happi- 
ness. For it has pleased God so graciously to stand by me in 
this fiercest attack of my life that if every friend in the world 
had abandoned me I should not have been alone. I need not 
tell you, who have both known and taught to others, that Christ 
has a peace which, surpassing all other experience of earthly 



REV. HENRY WARD B EEC HER. 263 

joy, requires for its possession an unusual earthly trial. In that 
peace I have rested as in God's pavilion. . . . 

" I never expected to stand up in the publicity which God 
has been pleased to draw me into, and faithfully to declare His 
truth against the interests of commercial and political circles, 
and not be visited with this wrath. 

" But they shall neither destroy me nor daunt me nor silence 
me, for my God is greater than their devil. I will work yet hard- 
er and speak more plainly for every blow they deal. May God 
repay your kindness to me a thousand-fold ! 

" H. W. Beecher." 

We find no word from Mr. Beecher concerning the election 
of this year, but an article immediately following shows that he 
kept his eye upon the main issue, and that none of its humorous 
any more than its sorrowful features escaped him. It was enti- 
tled '• Degraded into Liberty" : 

11 A Southern gentleman en route for Texas brought to New 
York eight slaves, to be shipped hence by one of our ocean- 
going steamers. The birds of the air informed the Abolitionists 
of the facts, and it was not long before a writ was served upon 
the whole chattel-gang, and they were hauled up before Judge 
Paine to show cause why they should not be doomed to free- 
dom. The cruel inhospitality of New York was never more 
manifest. These innocent fellow-beings, blessed by being born 
slaves, and not painfully educated for it, as Northern Southerners 
are ; having had all the manifold mercies which make a Virginia 
slave so much better off than a free factory-girl in Massachusetts ; 
having grown up in the indulgence of those hilarious dances and 
in the practice of those songs which make plantation life perfect- 
ly paradisaical, they were on their way to that land waving with 
sugar-cane and cotton-plants, where, hoe in hand, they were to 
while away the brilliant hours with gentle dalliances with loam 
and clay — when lo ! they were suddenly arrested. 

" From these bright anticipations they have been ruthlessly 
snatched, and plunged into freedom utterly unprepared ! Are 
there no tears in Castle Garden ? Ought not the Union Com- 
mittee to spend something for a trifle of crape ? Eight innocent 
fellow-chattels changed into fellow-beings ! No kind master 
have they now. The tender relation is sundered. Our be- 



264 BIOGRAPHY OF 

reaved master and mistress must depart slaveless and alone. 
Having been worked for so long, and tended and taken care 
of, it is doubtful whether they will be able to take care of them- 
selves now. Much as we sympathize with them, we do not con- 
sider their affliction at all comparable to that of the late happy 
slaves. These poor creatures are free, and we are assured in the 
highest quarter that no greater evil than that can well befall the 
slave population. They have degraded themselves. They have 
refused to be ' content rather.' In all the world they cannot find 
a man who owns them. They are now to sneak through life, 
like white men, owning themselves ! They must have had some 
awful moments of compunction when the conviction first flashed 
upon them that they owned their own hands, trod upon their 
own feet, put their clothes upon their own shoulders, and felt 
that thing throbbing under their ribs to be their own heart. 
Some natural feelings must have shot through the maternal heart 
as she pressed her own babe to her own breast, and dropped her 
own tears upon its dusky cheek. . . . 

" Only one woman can be found faithful in this emergency. 
Their former mistress alone has appealed to their conscience 
and adjured them to return to her ! Where were the teachers, 
the chaplains, the casuists, the lawyers, that a little time ago 
choked the press with beatitudes of slavery ? ' His watchmen 
are blind ; they are all ignorant ; they are all dumb dogs ; they 
cannot bark ; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.' 

" In reply to Mrs. Lemmon's appeal the deluded slave-woman 
drew herself up, and, pressing her child to her breast, said, * I had 
rather be free ! ' What ! not value the radiant mercies of slavery 
more than that ? The creature is crazy ! Slaves in their senses 
are always contented. They are mere pets. The Uncle Toms 
of Virginia do nothing but look after the children, or sit in sun- 
ny nooks and smoke their stubbed pipes. The Aunt Phillises 
are always fat, rollicking cooks, bursting with laughter. Nobody 
is happy but slaves. The poor masters have all the care and 
burden, slaves all the glee and leisure. . . . 

" It is a dreadful state of things here in New York, where we 
feed upon Cotton, and have our very living in the smiles and 
favor of the South, to be hurting their feelings by talking so 
much about liberty and all that. A few more slaves set free, 
and the South will get angry again ; and then New York will 



RE V. HENR V WA RD BEE CHER. 265 

be in a world of trouble, and another call will call together an- 
other Castle Garden full of anxious merchants, all full of love 
to the South ; and we shall have more sermons and more news- 
paper articles ; and nobody can tell what will happen the next 
time. 

" In part, the South is at fault. It has sent North the wrong 
kind of negroes. Those who have run away, or been judicially 
sentenced to freedom, or been bought — all these have loved lib- 
erty. Now, won't the South send us some of another sort — some 
of those model slaves that love bondage and wouldn't take lib- 
erty if they could get it ? With a few specimen copies of such, 
we believe that we could do Southern institutions great good in 
the North. * " 

Fifty-three follows in much the same line as that of the two 
years immediately preceding. Franklin Pierce, who had been 
elected in November last, takes the oath of office on the 4th of 
March. His inaugural gives expression to what was undoubtedly 
the general feeling of the country — a determination that the Com- 
promise measures shall be enforced, and a fervent trust that the 
question of slavery has been settled ; and in his annual message, 
upon the assembling of Congress in that year, promises that the 
peace which now so happily existed through the land should not 
be disturbed during his term of office, if he could prevent it. 
A large majority of the people, both North and South, were un- 
doubtedly in perfect accord with this desire, greatly pleased with 
this assurance, and tried to share his confidence. 

Those were days in which a great deal of sympathy was felt 
in this country for the Irish, and by many, too, who were stanch 
opposers of liberty for the negro. Mr. Beech er had no patience 
with men, on either side of the Atlantic, whose sympathy was 
limited by the bounds of race or color ; and when John Mitchel, 
who had posed as the " Great Irish Patriot " of that day, having 
escaped from an English penal colony and been received here 
with great enthusiasm, took occasion to state in an editorial in 
the Citizen, "We deny that it is a crime or a wrong, or even a 
peccadillo, to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to sell slaves, to keep 
slaves to their work by flogging or other needful coercion ; we 
only wish we had a good plantation well stocked with healthy 
negroes in Alabama," he (Mr. Beecher) enters into public corre- 
spondence with him, in which he denies the claims of the refugee 



266 BIOGRAPHY OF 

to be an "apostle of liberty," sorrows over his downfall, and 
dismisses him to the test of history in these words : 

" Once you stood like some great oak whose wide circumfer- 
ence was lifted up above all the pastures, the glory of all behold- 
ers, and a covert for a thousand timid singing-birds ! Now you lie 
at full length along the ground, with mighty ruptured roots ragged 
and upturned to heaven, with broken boughs and despoiled 
leaves ! Never again shall husbandman predict spring from your 
swelling buds! Never again shall God's singing-birds of liberty 
come down through all the heavenly air to rest themselves on 
your waving top ! Fallen ! Uprooted ! Doomed to the axe and 
the hearth ! 

" But there is a future beyond this, even on earth ! There is 
a time promised, and already dawning, in which the human 
family shall be one great brotherhood, and Love shall be the law 
of man ! In that golden age there shall be research made for all 
the names that, since the world began, have wrought and suf- 
fered for the good of their kind. There will be a memorable 
resurrection of forgotten names. From the obscurity into which 
despotism has flung all who dared to defy it, from the shades 
and darkness of oblivion by which oppressors would cover down 
the memory of all who proclaimed human right and human 
liberty, they will come forth shining like the sun, and none be 
forgotten that labored to bring to pass the world's freedom ! In 
that day, when ten thousand names shall be heard, in all their 
number not one shall utter that gone and forgotten name — John 
Mitchel ! " 

We do not wish it to be inferred from our words that Mr. 
Beecher was the only anti-slavery leader who was doing good 
service in those days. There were many others, and some, per- 
haps, were doing as effective work in a single line as he. But 
we believe that, when the whole sphere of his activity was con- 
sidered, he went far beyond any man of his time. 

In anyone of the three channels of largest influence, of that or 
of any time — the pulpit, the press, and the platform — he was the 
peer, if not the superior, of any leader ; and while the most of 
his co-laborers used but one. or at the most two, of these instru- 
mentalities, he was constantly employing the three, and each with 
unequalled efficiency. 

His beliefs, as his labors, were broader than the most who 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 267 

were at that day prominently identified with the anti-slavery 
cause. He believed in the Constitution of the United States, 
and claimed that, if the government should be administered 
according to the original intent of this document, slavery must 
speedily cease. In this he differed from Garrison and his school, 
who held that "the (Federal) Constitution is a covenant with 
death and an agreement with hell." He believed in the ballot- 
box, and in using its power to the utmost. In this he differed 
from Wendell Phillips and others of his school, who had dis- 
franchised themselves for years, lest by voting they should seem 
to countenance an institution that was being used for the per- 
petuity of so great an injustice. He believed in the Church 
and the moral forces which she could bring to the work. He 
believed in love rather than hate, and most of all, with a tri- 
umphant, joyful faith, he believed in the person, presence, and 
leadership of the Redeemer and Reformer of the world. In all 
this he separated from the great body, individuals here and there 
excepted, of the Garrison and Pillsbury school of Abolitionists. 

His judgment of the spirit of the leaders in this great move- 
ment may be inferred from the following extracts : 

" Events made Garrison a leader. We never thought, and 
we do not now think, that Garrison deserved the one-half of the 
bitter reproaches that have been heaped upon him. His worst 
faults have been the reaction, in him, of the opposite faults of 
men favoring slavery or indifferent to it. But we regard him as 
one of the most unfortunate of all leaders for the best develop- 
ment of anti-slavery feeling. He is a man of no mean ability, 
of indefatigable industry, of the most unbounded enterprise and 
eagerness, of perseverance which pushes him like a law of na- 
ture, and of courage which amounts to recklessness. These are 
the qualifications which make a man powerful for stimulation. 
Had he possessed, as a balance to these, conciliation, good-na- 
tured benevolence, or even a certain popular mirthfulness ; had 
he possessed the moderation and urbanity of Clarkson, or the 
deep piety of Wilberforce, he had been the one man of our age. 
These all he lacked. Had the disease of America needed only 
counter-irritation, no better blister could have been applied. 

" Garrison did not create the anti-slavery spirit of the North. 
He was the offspring of it. It existed before he was born. But 
he at one time more powerfully developed and organized it than 



268 BIOGRAPHY OF 

any other one mind ; and developed it in modes and spirit, as 
we think, most unfortunate. Anti-slavery under his influence 
was all teeth and claw. It fought. It never conciliated. It 
gained not one step by kindness. It won not a single fort by 
surrender. It bombarded everything it met, and stormed every 
place which it won. We do not deny that Garrison and his early 
followers did a great work. Another generation will divide 
praise and blame, as no one is fitted to do in the heats of the 
present day. But when bare justice shall be done we believe 
that it will be found that a noble soul, deeply and truly benevo- 
lent, who sought the truest interests of his age, yet sought them 
with such a fierceness and such a hard and relentless courage as 
constantly roused up in his path the worst feelings of man, and 
heaped obstacles before him to such a degree that at length, in 
combating them, his sympathies for good seemed swallowed up 
in a bitter hatred of evil. The result of the agitation, inspired 
largely with this feeling, was that almost every interest in the 
nation rose up against the movement with which he was identi- 
fied. Churches dreaded abolitionism, parties hated abolitionism, 
commerce abhorred abolitionism. Mobs rioted around the meet- 
ings, and threatened the dwellings, the stores, and the very per- 
sons of Abolitionists. 

" There was odium and influence enough arrayed against the 
anti-slavery movement, under the form of early abolitionism, to 
have sunk ten enterprises which depended on men for existence. 
But there was a spirit in this cause, there was a secret strength, 
which nerved it, and it lived right on, and grew, and trampled 
down opposition, and came forth victorious ! There was an 
irresistibility in it which made it superior to the faults of its 
friends and the deadly hatred of its enemies." 

It will be seen from the above how thoroughly he differed 
from what may be called the right wing of the Abolition party. 

This difference is emphasized and the spirit which impelled 
him is indicated in an address which he delivered before the an- 
nual meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, and in a letter which 
he wrote to the New York Tribune in answer to a criticism that 
appeared in that paper : 

" I believe there is to be found Christianity enough in the 
world, in the Church and out of it, in the Bible and out of it, i.e., 
in the record and in the living heart, and, I had almost said, 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 269 

breathed through the very air, as a Divine Providence, inspiring 
the great organic laws of society, controlling the moral sense of 
the Church, yea, beating in the veins of political economy, subtly 
guiding the common generosities of men into a public sentiment 
which, in God's own time, in spite of recreant clergymen, apos- 
tate statesmen, venal politicians, and trafficking shopmen, shall 
fall upon this vast and unmitigated abomination and utterly crush 
it. But my earnest desire is that slavery may be destroyed "by 
the manifest power of Christianity. If it were given me to choose 
whether it should be destroyed in fifty years by selfish commer- 
cial influences, or, standing for seventy-five years, be then the 
spirit and trophy of Christ, I had rather let it linger twenty-five 
years more, that God may be honored, and not mammon, in the 
destruction of it. So do I hate it that I should rejoice in its ex- 
tinction, even did the devil tread it out, as he first kindled it ; 
but how much rather would I see God Almighty come down to 
shake the earth with His tread, to tread all tyrannies and oppres- 
sions small as the dust of the highway, and to take unto Himself 
the glory ! " 

This having been severely criticised, especially his willingness 
to have slavery linger, if by so doing its destruction could be- 
come a trophy to the prevailing power of Christ, he replies in a 
letter addressed to the same journal : 

" Our highest and strongest reason for seeking justice among 
men is not the benefit to men themselves, exceedingly strong as 
that motive is and ought to be. We do not join the movement 
party of our times simply because we are inspired by an inward 
and constitutional benevolence. We are conscious of both these 
motives and of many other collateral ones ; but we are earnestly 
conscious of another feeling stronger than either, that lives unim- 
paired when these faint, yea, that gives vigor and persistence to 
these feelings when they are discouraged ; and that is a strong per- 
sonal, enthusiastic love for Christ Jesus. I regard the movement 
of the world toward justice and rectitude to be of His inspira- 
tions. I believe my own aspirations, having a base in my natural 
faculties, to be influenced and directed by Christ's Spirit. The 
mingled affection and adoration which I feel for Him is the 
strongest feeling that I know. Whether I will or not, whether it 
be a phantasy or a sober sentiment, the fact is the same neverthe- 
less, that that which will give pleasure to Christ's heart and bring 



270 REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

to my consciousness a smile of gladness on His face in behalf of 
my endeavor, is incalculably more to me than any other motive. 
I would work for the slave for his own sake, but I am sure that 
I would work ten times as earnestly for the slave for Christ's 
sake. 

" I am not ashamed to own that I bear about with me an 
ineffaceable consciousness that I am what I am from Christ's in- 
fluence upon me. I accept the power to do good as His inspira- 
tion. Life is sacred to me only by my belief that I am walking 
in the scenes of a personal Divine Providence. When I drop 
from these beliefs life becomes void, the events of human society 
mere bubbles, and strifes of hope and fear, of good and bad, are 
useless as the turmoil of the rapids above Niagara. Nay, there 
is more than this : there is a heart-swell which no words can ex- 
press ; there is a sense of the sweet freedom of love, a sense of 
gracious pity, of patient condescension, of entire and transcendent 
excellence in Christ, which makes me feel how utterly true was 
the impassionate language of David : ' Whom have I in heaven 
but Thee ? and there is none upon earth that 1 desire besides Thee. 
My heart and my flesh cry out for God ! ' . . . 

" This sentiment does not spring from any indifference to the 
slave, but from a yet greater sympathy with Christ Jesus — the 
slave's only hope, my only hope, the Saviour of the world ! " 

With this letter we close our consideration of Mr. Beecher's 
work in this era of slavery agitation. Great as were his labors — 
and we think they were unsurpassed and unequalled by those of 
any other man — we still believe that his best contribution to the 
great cause was the spirit which he manifested and the motives 
that influenced him. It was like the walking of the Hebrew 
youths in the fiery furnace and coming forth unscathed from the 
flames. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

The Battle Renewed — Repeal of the Missouri Compromise Proposed — The 
Struggle in Congress — Mr. Beecher's Appeals — The Battle lost in Con- 
gress is Transferred to the Territories — Forces Engaged — Kansas War — 
Dred Scott Decision — Mr. Beecher's Defence of Kansas — " Beecher's 
Bibles" — Charles Sumner Attacked in the Senate — The Fremont Cam- 
paign — The Dog Noble. 

" TT ENRY, the battle is coming on. When it will end I know 
not. I only hope that every one feels as alert as I do" 
(extract from a letter of Mrs. Stowe to Henry Ward 
Beecher). It was dated November i, 1852, but expresses the feel- 
ing of some of the more sagacious ones during the whole of this 
era of apparent peace. They were not deceived by the surface 
calm. They felt that, beneath all party platforms, and the com- 
promises of party politics, and the make-shifts of a commercial 
spirit, the great conscience of the North was being stirred. Deep 
was calling unto deep, and the moanings of the sea that pre- 
saged the coming tempest had reached their ears. The storm, 
not a new one but the violent rising of the same old elements, 
began in Congress in the early part of 1854, upon the question of 
the organization of the territory of " The Platte," afterwards 
divided into two Territories called " Kansas and Nebraska." 
The star of empire was moving Westward, but of what kind 
should this empire be, of liberty or slavery ? If matters con- 
tinued as they then were it must be the former. California, 
stretching along the Pacific coast for two hundred and fifty miles 
below Mason and Dixon's line, had declared for freedom through 
all her borders. The Territories of New Mexico and Utah were 
not favorable to any great growth of slavery nor capable of 
rendering it much assistance. Texas, although intensely pro- 
slavery, yet, by reason of State pride, would not divide her im- 
perial domain into quarters for the benefit of that institution. 
Only in one direction was expansion and growth possible, and 
that was in this broad domain which was now asking to be organ- 
ized into Territories and would soon demand admission as States. 

271 



272 BIOGRAPHY OF 

Why should not this magnificent country be opened to the slave- 
owner and his property as well as to the settler from the North ? 
Was not this his right? Other factors than property interests 
have entered into the question. Conscience has been enlisted 
upon the one side as on the other. The South has come to look 
upon slavery as having equal rights, under the Constitution, with 
liberty, and she feels aggrieved that she is not given all the 
privileges of her fellow-citizens of the North. The only thing 
that apparently prevented this natural and, as it seemed to her, 
just expansion, was the Missouri Compromise, which had solemnly 
guaranteed this whole territory to freedom. Why not repeal this 
obnoxious measure ? The proposition to do this sprang from 
Kentucky. The same State which, through its senator. Henry 
Clay, had been foremost in originally securing the act, now 
through its senator, Mr. Dixon, his successor, was the first to 
ask for its repeal. Unlike as the movement seems, and dis- 
owned as it undoubtedly would have been by Mr. Clay, the great 
projector of the Missouri Compromise, yet in reality the sub- 
stance of each is the same. In both there is but one design — 
to placate the slave-power and save the country by attempting 
to compromise, not diverse interests, but antagonistic principles. 
They were but separate steps in one path, and that a road to- 
wards national perversion, disgrace, and ruin. The guiding star 
which once shone in the heavens had been lost, and our states- 
men were taking up with a will-o'-the-wisp, born of swamp and 
miasma, in its place. 

Although the project was conceived by the South, it could 
not have been brought to the birth, much less nourished into 
baneful strength, had it not been adopted by the North in the 
person of Stephen A. Douglas, one of the ablest leaders of the 
Democratic party, a member of the United States Senate, and 
chairman of the Committee upon Territories. Into the bill for 
organizing the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which he re- 
ported to the Senate in January of 1854, he introduced the pro- 
position to repeal the old Missouri Compromise. The mere pro- 
posal was regarded as little less than sacrilege. For thirty years 
that compromise had been looked upon as a sacred pledge, to be 
held in the same reverence as the Constitution itself. Scarcely 
four years before, the mover of the proposition for its repeal 
had described it as " canonized in the hearts of the American 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 2j$ 

people as a sacred thing which no ruthless hand would ever be 
reckless enough to disturb." An attempt to set it aside roused 
the most intense excitement throughout the whole land, the 
South in favor, the North opposed. The readiness with which 
the flame sprang up proved that through these past years of ap- 
parent quiet the fire had been covered but not put out. Now that 
fresh fuel was added and the draught opened, it blazed up more 
fiercely than ever. It was not confined to any class or condition. 

All of anti-slavery tendencies saw in it an evidence of the 
settled purpose of the South to nationalize the institution of 
slavery, and a testimony that it would not scruple to use any 
means to attain its end. 

Moralists saw in it a disregard of most sacred promises, and 
felt the ground of constitutional fidelity shaking under their feet. 
More than three thousand clergymen in New England signed a 
protest against the action proposed. 

" We protest against the repeal of the Missouri Compromise 
as a great moral wrong ; as a breach of faith, eminently unjust to 
the moral principles of the community and subversive of all con- 
fidence in national engagements ; as a measure full of danger to 
the peace and even the existence of our beloved Union, and ex- 
posing us to the righteous judgments of the Almighty." 

Even the mere politician was angry that an issue so repug- 
nant to a majority of the people had been so unwisely precipi- 
tated. Nor were his anger and apprehension unwarranted. 
The storm of popular indignation swept down like a tempest upon 
the forests, scattering dead leaves, breaking off dead branches, 
and throwing down trees that had become rotten in trunk or 
root. Before the end of the year the Democratic party had lost 
its magnificent majority in Congress, and the Whig party had 
practically ceased to exist, dishevelled, torn up by the roots, 
buried by the storm. 

During this preliminary contest Mr. Beecher is neither indif- 
ferent nor silent. In lectures, in special sermons, and in numer- 
ous Star Papers he makes his influence felt. In one of the latter 
upon " The Crisis " his appeals and reproaches go out to all 
classes : 

" The virtue, the morals, the prosperity of a domain large 
enough to be an empire has no safeguard about it. Those 
future States, silent and unpopulous, are like so many lambs hud- 



2 74 BIOGRAPHY OF 

died in a thicket by crowds of wolves, that only wait for some 
single taste of blood to plunge in and tear the whole ! Unless 
there is a storm from the people that shall roll like thunder in 
the mountains ; unless the recreant and graceless herd in Con- 
gress shall hear the coming down of many waters, like roaring 
freshets from mountains on whose tops clouds have burst, there 
will soon be no more ground to fight for. If anything is to 
be done it must be done by the North. It must be quickly, 
loudly, and impetuously done ! There must be an outcry coming 
up from the bosom of the people, like that which rent the mid- 
night of Egypt when all its first-born were stricken. Let no man 
wait for his fellow. Let children and women lead and teach 
sluggish manhood with what energy and soul a voice should be 
heard for liberty, upon half a continent, like the voice of God 
when He speaks in storms ! 

" Let every single man write, ' I solemnly protest against the 
perfidy and the outrage of abolishing the Missouri Compromise ' ; 
and as he bears it to the post-office, if he find a fellow to sign it, 
let him sign ; but if not, let it go as his single protest. 

" Let families send solemn protests — the father and mother, 
the children and hired laborers. Let there be ten thousand peti- 
tions from single families within a week at Washington. 

" Let churches and congregations unite and send instant 
petitions. 

" In this solemn hour of peril, when all men's hearts sink 
within them, we have an appeal to those citizens who rebuked us 
for our fears in 1850. 

" Did you not declare that that should be a finality ? Did 
you not say that, by a concession of conscience, we should there- 
after have peace ? 

" Is this the peace ? Is this the fulfilment of your promise ? 
Is not this the very sequence which we told you would come ? 
That compromise was a ball of frozen rattlesnakes. You turned 
them in your hands then with impunity. We warned and be- 
sought. We protested and adjured. You persisted in bringing 
them into the dwelling. You laid them down before the fire. 
Now where are they ? They are crawling all around. Their 
fangs are striking death into every precious interest of liberty ! 
It is your work ! 

" In this emergency where are those ministers of the Gospel 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 275 

who have always refused to infuse into the public mind a sound 
and instructed moral sentiment upon the subject of slavery ? 
Hitherto you have been silent, because it did not concern tJie 
North. We earnestly protested that so deep and dreadful a 
disease could not prey upon any limb of this nation and not 
strike its taint and danger through and through the whole body 
politic. We implored men not to let the first principles of human 
rights die out of the popular mind ; not to let a gigantic engine 
of despotism, through its selfish remunerations of commerce, 
deaden every quick sensibility to justice and bribe to sleep the 
vigilance of humanity, though every palm should have thrice as 
many pieces of silver as did he of old. 

" The North is both bound and asleep. It is bound with 
bonds of unlawful compromise ! You, ministers of Christ, held 
her limbs, while the gaunt and worthy minions of oppression 
moved about, twisting inextricable cords about her hands and 
feet ; or, like Saul, stood by, holding the garments of those that 
slew the martyr ! The poor Northern conscience has been like 
a fly upon a spider's web. Her statesmen, and not a few of her 
'ministers, have rolled up the struggling insect, singing fainter 
and fainter, with webs of sophistry, till it now lies a miserable, 
helpless victim, and Slavery is crawling up to suck its vital 
blood ! 

"What, then, do you owe to God, to heaven, and to your 
country, in an effort to regain conscience, liberty, and duty ? 
God, who searches the heart, knows that it is not in our heart to 
say these things for the sake of aspersion. We would lie down 
before you, and let your steps tread our very neck, if you 
were only marching toward the high ends of our country's good. 
But we cannot endure to see noble and venerable ministers of 
the Gospel first duped and deceived, and made to serve the ends 
of oppression, and then, when the mighty juggle is detected, 
stand silent and aghast, as unwilling now to repair as before to 
prevent the utter misery and evil. 

" But let us not be deceived. Let every man be prepared for 
a future ! If this bill shall be defeated the North will be like 
a man just dragged out of the rapids above Niagara ! If this bill 
pass, the North will be like a man whirled in the very wildest 
rage of the infuriate rapids and making headlong haste toward 
the awful plunge. 



2 j6 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" Does any man believe that there can be peace if this iniquity- 
goes forward ? Will the South, with such advantage gained, easily 
relinquish her grip ? Will the North, betrayed, wounded, and re- 
ligiously aroused from the very bottom, let slave States come to 
the door of the Union, from the very territory of which she has 
been cheated, and bid them enter ? Such struggles are before us 
as we have never seen. The next time the masses, the religious- 
minded men of the then undivided North, are aroused, standing 
on no flimsy base of compromise but on the solid foundations of 
humanity, of natural feeling, of a Northern national feeling 
springing from a love of liberty, they will not be put to sleep 
again by any mere pretences of peace. The finality which the 
South gave was a hollow truce but to give them time to forge 
their arms and grind their swords. They bribed the North with 
a lie. The next time the North reaches forth her hand it will 
scarcely be for gold or silver. There is more danger now of wild 
collisions than of lying finalities. It will come to that if the fool- 
ish counsels of timid men prevail. If civil wars are to be pre- 
vented, now is the time ; courage to-day or carnage to-morrow. 
Firmness will give peace ; trembling will bring war. 

Another one follows upon "The Christian's Duty to Liberty" : 
" Mar. 23, 1854. — At length God seems to have caught the 
wicked in their own craft. It was not in the power of all the 
men of the North to develop so earnest a feeling against slavery 
and for liberty as is now finding tongue and giving itself forth all 
over the North. All that for which we have been counted un- 
charitable by men anxious to be honorable toward the South has 
come to pass. 

" Let the conscience of the North settle this question, not her 
fears. God calls us to a religious duty. Long has our talent lain 
in a napkin. Our testimony for liberty has been waived ; our as- 
sertion of freedom has been timid and without enthusiasm. We 
have refused to accept at God's hands the true mission of the 
North, to preach liberty to the captives and elevation to the 
whole human family. At length let the banner flow out to the 
wind, let the battle begin. There will never be another day of 
grace if this goes past. Retreat now and the North will never re- 
treat again. We beseech Christian men and ministers to put this 
question where it belongs, upon a religious basis. Let them feel 
their duty in their own land as they feel their duty of preaching 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 2JJ 

the truth of Christ, whether men will hear or whether they will 
forbear. 

" Oh ! that God, by breathing a spirit of prayer upon His peo- 
ple and of unflinching fidelity, would give us token that He has 
appeared at length for our salvation ! " 

In spite of all efforts to the contrary, the repeal of the Mis- 
souri Compromise was effected in September of 1854, and the 
battle which had been fought in Congress and lost by the free 
States was at once transferred to the newly- admitted Territory, 
and was there waged with a fierceness and persistence that cannot 
be understood or appreciated, unless it be remembered that Kan- 
sas had become the strategic point of the whole great conflict. 
Given Kansas, slavery would have not only additional territory, 
but, what was even more important to its purposes, a majority in 
the United States Senate that should for ever, as it hoped, pre- 
vent the admission of more free than slave States, or the follow- 
ing of any course which should be prejudicial to its interests. In 
this new field the North at first labored under great disadvan- 
tage. The peculiar institution had already been planted and had 
taken root. The eastern border of Kansas was upon Missouri, a 
slave State which was fully aware of the advantage that broader 
fields would furnish the labor of her increasing slave population, 
and containing enough of a rough and wild frontier element to carry 
through any plan that desperation or villany might devise. The 
President of the United States Senate and acting Vice-President 
of the United States, David R. Atchison, was on the ground, and 
for months had been organizing Blue Lodges and other secret 
bodies, with the intent to take possession of the Territory, or at 
least of its polling-places, and secure it for slavery. The officers 
appointed by the President — a governor, three judges, a secretary, 
a marshal, and an attorney — were, of course, all favorable to the 
policy of the Administration, a policy which was all that the most 
radical pro-slavery advocate could desire. 

The party thus happily situated did not hesitate to avail itself 
of its advantages. Its members swarmed across the borders at 
the election of a delegate to Congress, took possession of the 
ballot-boxes, appointed judges of election from their own num- 
ber, elected their man by an overwhelming majority, and then for 
the most part returned to their homes in Missouri. 

This was in October, 1854. In the following spring a Legis- 



2 yS BIOGRAPHY OF 

lature was elected by the same illegal process, and proceeded at 
once to form a constitution most rabidly pro-slavery. It pre- 
scribed the death-penalty for any who should entice or decoy 
away a slave or assist him to escape, and ten years' imprisonment 
for harboring or concealing a fugitive slave. To deny the right 
of holding slaves in the Territory, either by speaking, writing, 
printing or circulating books or papers, was declared to be felony, 
punishable with two years' imprisonment. Having formed an 
elaborate constitution of the above character, and made ample 
provision for enforcing its requirements, they selected a site for 
the new State capital, called it Lecompton — after the attorney of 
the State, whose legal acquirements had assisted them greatly in 
their villany — and adjourned. 

Looking upon affairs as they then appeared, and seeing that 
the Legislature, however elected, had been officially recognized, 
and that its enactments were in form legal, that the whole ma- 
chinery of .courts, marshals, and militia were in its hands and 
could be used to enforce its statutes, that it was favored by 
the Administration and the dominant faction at Washington, 
which could employ the United States army for its support, it 
would seem as if the battle had already been lost to the Free- 
State men, and that Kansas could be counted upon to give that 
majority in the United States Senate which the slave-power so 
greatly coveted. But other forces were at work. In the first 
place, the very enormity of these slave-laws compelled all the 
decent residents of Kansas, whether Free-Soil, Whig, or Demo- 
crat, to combine for their own defence against the possible out- 
rages to which they were exposed by these enactments. In the 
second place, the party which had brought about the repeal of 
the Missouri Compromise had, by this very act, lost the control 
of the Lower House in Congress, and could not be relied upon 
to admit the Territory with its present infamous code. Besides 
these near and more immediate advantages, there were forces en- 
listed on this side that were working slowly but with great cer- 
tainty toward the result aimed at by the Free-State men. The old 
migratory instinct which had throbbed in the veins of this race 
from the first, which had brought them from the steppes of Asia 
to the shores of the Atlantic, pushed the stronger and abler ones 
across the seas, moved them from the sea-coast to the foot of the 
Alleghanies, then drove them across this barrier to take posses- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 279 

sion of the great valley of the Ohio and the Mississippi, was still 
as active as ever and readily responded to the enticements of the 
new and fertile lands just opened in Kansas for settlement. No 
sooner was it known that the broad plains of this Territory could 
be occupied than the tide began to flow in this direction. Prin- 
ciple also came in to strengthen and ennoble this instinct. 

"Then arose a majesty of self-sacrifice that had no parallel 
before. Instead of merely protesting, young men and maidens, 
laboring men, farmers, mechanics, sped with a sacred desire to 
rescue free territory from the toils of slavery, and emigrated in 
thousands, not to better their own condition, but in order that 
when this Territory should vote it should vote for freedom." 

Lest both instinct and principle should move too slowly or 
with insufficient equipment, emigrant societies were formed at the 
North to assist those who would offer themselves for the redemp- 
tion of Kansas. One of the earliest of these to be on the ground 
was the " Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company," headed by the 
Hon. Eli Thayer. This organization sent out a body of some 
thirty persons, who, in July of this year, had founded the town of 
Lawrence. With this company, organized, mutually acquainted, 
and trained in the orderly methods of New England, for a centre, 
there rapidly gathered a strong body, and one that well repre- 
sented the bona-fide settlers of Kansas. They proceeded at once 
to call a mass convention and elect delegates. In due time a 
Constitutional Convention was called at Topeka, October 23, 
1855, which formed a constitution, submitted it to the people, 
from whom it met with a hearty endorsement. It was then trans- 
mitted to Congress for approval. 

These, Lecompton and Topeka, were the storm-centres around 
which surged the principal events of those turbulent times in 
Kansas which have been designated as " The Kansas War." It 
was a wild, irregular, barbarous, and bloody strife, made up of 
night-attacks, house-burnings, secret murders, skirmishes between 
armed bodies sometimes rising to the proportions of a battle, 
Lawrence twice burned, Leavenworth sacked, and acts of that 
description, filling up four years or more of most eventful history. 

Kansas at that time was the skirmish-line of two great hosts 
that were already settling down to a life-and-death struggle. On 
the one side a Legislature, as we have seen, elected largely by 
the votes of marauders from an adjoining State ; a reckless popu- 



280 BIOGRAPHY OF 

lation just over the line, whose historic name, Border Ruffians, 
seems to have been fully deserved, organized into secret bands 
ready to march at a moment's warning, equipped either to vote or 
fight as should be required ; a regiment of United States troops 
placed at their disposal ; the whole South awake to the work 
they have undertaken, and forwarding supplies of men and money 
for the support of those already on the field ; and the Administra- 
tion at Washington, through portions of two presidential terms, 
alternately scheming and commanding for its success. 

On the other hand was a Legislature, illegally convened, but 
elected by a large majority of the resident population of the Ter- 
ritory, with a constituency, some of them doubtless adventurers, 
some fanatics, and others possibly villains, but for the most part 
honest homesteaders, living, it may be, in sod huts or dug-outs, but 
living upon land which they had pre-empted and could call their 
own ; the great North behind them, slowly but surely moving 
down to their rescue ; the throb of the world's progress beating 
towards them ; the consciousness that they are fulfilling the pur- 
poses of God in saving this land to liberty animating them ; and 
the great natural elements of soil, air, and sunshine, that are al- 
ways on the side of liberty, working for them. These were the 
forces on the other side. 

Each section came to the support of its skirmish-line in char- 
acteristic fashion : the South by military companies and the in- 
cursions of armed bands of raiders aiming to conquer the coun- 
try, if necessary, by force of arms and overawe it into accepting 
its bogus State constitution. The North came in emigrant- 
wagons, with family, stock, house-furniture, and farm utensils, 
prepared to remain and occupy the land. 

The general trend of the government at an early period in 
the strife, as seen in various acts at home and abroad, must also 
be taken into the account. The Ostend Manifesto, issued under 
the inspiration of President Pierce by our three ministers, Bu- 
chanan, Mason, and Soule, at the courts respectively of London, 
Paris, and Madrid, recommended the purchase of Cuba, if pos- 
sible; if not that we obtain it by force. "If Spain," they said, 
" should refuse to sell Cuba to the United States, then by every 
law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from 
her, if we possess the power." Slavery at this period had a 
foreign as well as a home policy. It was that of the old bucca- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 28 I 

neer, a policy of unscrupulous aggression, that would not hesi- 
tate to embroil the nation in war, if necessary for the carrying- 
out of its designs. Filibustering expeditions, which were con- 
tinually being planned and attempted at this time against Cuba 
and Central America, were rightly looked upon not only as addi- 
tional proof of the purpose but as the initial steps in the pro- 
posed plan of foreign conquest. 

As if the forces arrayed against liberty were not enough, as 
the conflict advanced the Supreme Court of the United States 
added its influence to the side of the antagonist. In the historic 
Dred Scott decision, given in the spring of 1857, the ground is 
taken that the negro slave is so completely and exclusively 
property, under the Constitution, that the owner can take him, as 
any other property, into any and all territory belonging to the 
United States government. In effect " the negro has no rights 
which the white man is bound to respect." 

After the lapse of many years, upon a calm review of that 
decision it is difficult to say whether the historical errors, the 
feeble reasoning, or the immoral sentiments most awaken our 
surprise and contempt. It is sufficient for our purpose at this 
time to know that this decision threw a vast influence against 
the Free-State men. If it were final, then their struggle was 
all in vain. Strive as much as they would, and suffer as much 
as they might, they could never make Kansas a free State. 
And yet, in spite of the Dred Scott decision, the hostility of 
the Administration, and all other adverse forces and circum- 
stances, they held on. To this result had our country come through 
the compromises and surrenders of three-quarters of a century : 
slavery in possession of the machinery of government, nationalized 
by the highest tribunal in the land, declared to have equal rights 
with freedom in all the public domain, and, in logical sequence, 
not to be shut out from even the free States. Every institu- 
tion of thirty millions of freemen was to be judged and graded, 
encouraged or restrained, with supreme reference to the inte- 
rests of this institution. Dominant at home, it was already tak- 
ing steps preparatory to foreign conquest, and the only effective 
obstacle in the way of the consummation of its plans was the 
life-and-death tenacity with which the free settlers of Kansas 
held to their determination that theirs should be a free State. 

The contest continued for four years before any substantial 



282 BIOGRAPHY OF 

advantage was gained for the Free State party. Four governors, 
three appointed by President Pierce and one by President Bu- 
chanan, had successively been sent, and then deposed and dis- 
graced because they could not, or would not, carry out the un- 
just measures proposed by the Administration. The victory in 
Congress in 1858 was simply a resubmission of the Lecompton 
constitution to the people of the State to be voted upon, whether 
they would accept it or frame one for themselves. They of 
course buried it amid universal execrations. Slight and unmis- 
takably just as was this concession of Congress, it was neverthe- 
less secured but by a small majority. The change of five votes 
would have passed the notorious Lecompton Bill, admitted the 
State with slavery into the Union, added two senators to the slave- 
power, restored the supremacy of that power in the Senate of the 
United States, to be followed by the carrying out the Dred 
Scott decision to its logical consequences, slavery supremacy at 
home, slavery aggression, annexation, and expansion over Cuba 
and Central America, abroad. A vast slave-empire stretching 
from the lakes to the southern shores of the Caribbean Sea seemed 
not an improbable dream, if there had not been wisdom enough 
or will enough to fight the battle ou*t in Kansas. All honor to 
those brave men and women who in those days saved this Terri- 
tory to the North ! All honor to those who stood by them and 
helped them to win ! A more important battle was never fought 
in our history, and a more heroic spirit was never shown. What 
the chateau of Hougoumont, held by the British right centre, was 
to the battle of Waterloo ; what the " Bloody Angle " held by 
Hancock was to the battle of Spottsylvania Court-House, such 
was the Kansas war in the early and determining era of the great 
American conflict. 

Call this four years of struggle one battle, and it will take rank 
with the "fifteen great battles" of the world's history, second in 
importance to none. 

We have thus given an outline of this great preliminary strug- 
gle of the war, that Mr. Beecher's position and labors, which were 
much criticised at the time, may be seen in their true light. As 
is well known, he threw himself into this work with all the enthu- 
siasm which such an emergency might be supposed to awaken. 
He felt the importance of the struggle and the need of instant 
action. Since, under the doctrine of " squatter sovereignty," 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 283 

which had taken the place of the former restriction, the question 
of freedom or slavery in Kansas must be decided by the vote of 
the actual settlers, these must be aided to emigrate to that Terri- 
tory from the North, and at once. Since they were to be the 
foundation elements of a Christian State, they should be supplied 
with Bibles ; and since they would doubtless be called upon to de- 
fend themselves against attack, they must be supplied with fire- 
arms. He lectured and took up collections in Plymouth Church 
and from the lecture platform for Sharp's rifles, an arm then but 
just come into notice. He preached, lectured, and bought rifles 
with the same object in view — to redeem men to liberty ; and 
with the same spirit — love to God and man. Some of the rifles, 
it is said, were sent in boxes marked Bibles, but without his 
knowledge, and so passed in safety through Missouri and the ene- 
my's lines. Hence the term Beecher's Bibles came to be applied 
to these effective weapons. 

At this timq he published his famous " Defence of Kansas," 
that showed not more clearly the warmth of his spirit than his 
clear understanding of the issues at stake and the dangers that 
were impending : 

" A battle is to be fought. If we are wise it will be bloodless. 
If we listen to the pusillanimous counsels of men who have never 
shown one throb of sympathy for liberty, we shall have blood to 
the horses' bridles. If we are firm and prompt to obvious duty, 
if we stand by the men of Kansas and give them all the help 
they need, the flames of war will be quenched before it bursts 
forth, and both they of the West and we of the East shall, after 
some angry mutterings, rest down in peace. But if our ears are 
poisoned by the advice of men who never rebuke violence on the 
side of power, and never fail to inveigh against the self-defence 
of wronged liberty, we shall invite aggression and civil war. 
And let us know assuredly that civil war will not burst forth in 
Kansas without spreading. Now, if bold wisdom prevails, the 
conflict will be settled afar off in Kansas, and without blows or 
blood. But timidity and indifference will bring down blows there, 
which will not only echo in our houses hitherward, but will by 
and by lay the foundation for an armed struggle between the 
whole North and the South. Shall we let the spark kindle, or 
shall we quench it now ? But, that intelligent citizens may the 
better judge, let the facts of this case be reviewed. . . . 



284 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" There was never so strong an appeal to public sympathy as 
that which is presented in the case of Kansas free settlers. Their 
emigration was a mission of mercy, full of the ripest fruits of 
Christianity. Their conduct has been noble. They have borne 
hardships without faltering, they have borne outrage and perse- 
cution with patience, returning good for evil. They have suf- 
fered wrongs manifold and infinitely provoking, without retalia- 
tion. When aggression on one occasion was pushed so sorely 
that their patience failed, some of the men said : ' We cannot 
bear such wrongs.' The reply made by Pomeroy will become a 
maxim of Christian men : ' Be patient ! your wrongs are your 
very strength.' 

" When the armed day came, and their adversaries came out 
to consume them, then, and only then, they took up arms and 
surrounded their homes with living men, determined not to 
attack, but never to surrender. . . . Once when England only 
asserted the right to tax the colonies without representation, the 
colonies rebelled and went to war. But now a foreign Legisla- 
ture has been imposed upon Kansas. That Legislature has legal- 
ized slavery against the known wishes of nine-tenths of the actual 
settlers. It has decreed that no man shall enter the Territory 
who will not take an oath of allegiance to this spurious Legisla- 
ture. It has made it death to give liberty to the man escaping 
from oppression. It has muzzled the press. It has forbidden 
discussion. It has made free speech a penitentiary offence. The 
rights for which the old colonists fought were superficial com- 
pared with these. These are the rights which lie at the very 
heart of personal liberty. 

" Indeed, there can be no personal freedom where free speech, 
a free press, a free canvass and discussion are penitentiary of- 
fences ! These are the laws which the President is determined to 
enforce ! Congress is to be asked for money to sustain this gov- 
ernment in Kansas, or to pay for an army to cut the throats of 
every free citizen who will not yield to this infamy ! . . . 

" Peace in Kansas means peace everywhere ; war there will 
be war all over the" land. Now it can be stopped. But fear will 
not do it. A truculent peace will not do it. Indolence and pre- 
sumptuous prayer will but hasten the mischief. When tyrants are 
in arms they who cry peace become their confederates. Manli- 
ness, action, courage, and ample preparation for defence will stop 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 285 

the danger. The Providence that will help us is the Providence 
that we help. God works for those who work for Him. When 
He answers prayer for harvests He inspires men to work, and 
petitions for crops and harvests are answered through ploughs and 
spades. And God will answer prayers for peace by inspiring 
men with justice, with abhorrence of oppression ; by making good 
men bold and active, and bad men feeble and cowardly ; by stop- 
ping the ears of the community to the counsel of cowards and 
hypocrites. Let every man in this awful crisis not fail to pray, 
and, that they may pray without hypocrisy, let them watch and 
work ! How shall we dare ask God to save us from bloodshed 
when we will not use the means He has put into our hands ? Faith 
without works and prayer without works are dead — stone-dead. 
Let the emigrants go hither and thither by hundreds, and pray as 
they go ! Let them that have money now pour it out, and pray 
as they give ! Let them that have sons in Kansas send them 
arms, and pray that they may have no occasion to use them ; but 
that, if they must be used, that the son may so wield them that 
the mother be not ashamed of the son whom she bore ! Let 
them that have influence speak out ! Let ministers and Christian 
free men now, if ever, speak against barbarism and uphold the 
whole retinue of Christian institutions ! Let those whose tongue 
has been hitherto palsied by evil advisers now loose their tongue 
and speak! Of whom will the land take counsel? There have 
been two sorts of counsellors hitherto. One has pointed out for 
twenty years the nature of slavery, its tendencies, the dangers 
which it threatened ; and all the prophecies have come true. The 
other kind of counsellors have predicted peace, dissuaded from 
action, urged compromise, and at each reluctant step have prom- 
ised the country peace. In not a single instance have they been 
right. Events have overthrown every one of their promises. 
They have led us down deeper into trouble at every step. We 
have been betrayed by kisses. Excitements have deepened, les- 
sons have multiplied, compromises have bred cockatrices. We 
are spun over with webs, We are tangled with sophistries. We 
have everything but manliness, straightforwardness, courage, and 
decisive wisdom. . . . 

" But what is done must be done quickly. Funds must be 
freely given ; arms must be had, even if bought at the price men- 
tioned by our Saviour : ' He that hath no sword, let him sell his 



2 86 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

garment and buy one.' Young men who would do aught for 
liberty should take no counsel of fear. Now is the time when a 
man may do for his country in an hour more than in a whole 
life besides. Time flies. Events hasten. Fear and treacherous 
peace, that betray duty with ignorant words of religion, will ruin 
all ; but energy, courage, action will save all. Woe to us if war 
comes from our fault ! If it comes, on the skirts of false peace 
will its blood be found ! " 

Of the result of this sending armed colonists into Kansas 
he speaks a few weeks later : 

" Of all the revolutions on record, we remember none so re- 
markable as that which has been wrought by Sharp's rifles. We 
do not know that a single man has ever been injured by them. 
They are guiltless of blood. But the principle which they in- 
volve has brought the whole South to a protest against violence, 
even in the extremest necessity of self-defence ! These afore- 
time heroes of the knife and revolver are now deep in the Scrip- 
tures. They are quoting all the peaceable texts ; they hang with 
irrepressible delight over all those passages which teach forbear- 
ance." 

Being attacked in a religious paper for his aggressive attitude, 
he answers : " We have acted consistently with our settled belief. 
We have nothing to retract." 

An event that took place at this time added still more fuel 
to the hot indignation that was glowing through the North — the 
attack by Preston S. Brooks, of South Carolina, upon Charles 
Sumner, May 22, 1856, in the Senate Chamber. It was an act 
so cowardly and atrocious that it cannot be recalled after these 
many years without a tingling of the blood. If a blow had been 
given at the moment of the debate, if the man seeking redress 
had approached his adversary face to face and given him oppor- 
tunity to defend himself, if it had been but a single blow, possi- 
bly some extenuation could be offered ; but to strike a man a 
stunning blow without warning, when he is sitting at his desk 
and so hampered that he is unable to rise until he has torn the 
desk up from its fastenings ; to follow with more than a score of 
blows until the instrument of attack, a heavy cane, is broken to 
pieces and his victim is left senseless — is an act that, search where 
it may, can find nothing to add to its infamy. Among the meet- 
ings called all over the North to give voice to the anger of 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 287 

the people at this dastardly act, one was in New York City. 
The advertised speakers were William M. Evarts, John Van 
Buren, Daniel Lord, Jr., and others of eminence. The speeches 
were able but tame and conservative. They did not meet 
the demand of the popular heart over that tremendous out- 
rage. Just as the meeting was being adjourned Mr. Beecher was 
discovered in the back part of the room, having come in to listen 
to men whose reputation was so great but whom he had never 
heard. At once the cry from the unsatisfied audience was 
" Beecher, Beecher ! " 

So unexpected was the call, and so annoyed was he at being 
called out, that it required almost physical force to get him to 
take the platform ; but when once there his soul kindled with the 
occasion. A simple recital of facts led the audience step by step 
over the ground which had been traversed for the last ten years. 
The grand principles of our polity were uncovered to their 
view. Scene after scene was depicted by his marvellous dramatic 
power, culminating in that outrage in the Senate Chamber on ac- 
count of which they had gathered ; and the audience, alternately 
moved by his pathos, fired by his passion, or swept by his humor, 
became one with the speaker. They saw as he saw, they felt as 
he felt ; and he stamped them that night with the impress of his 
hatred of slavery and his burning enthusiasm for liberty. The 
next day the press carried this impression to the multitude of its 
readers, and, dismissing the other speeches of the evening with a 
formal notice, gave his as nearly as possible verbatim. It was 
his meeting for the first time upon the platform with the leading 
men of the country, and from that hour he took his place with 
them and held it to the end. 

Many leading men in Massachusetts having been invited to a 
similar meeting held in Boston, and sending regrets, he analyzes 
their excuses in a Star Paper upon " Hearts and no Hearts": 

" Admirable ! The man is sacrificed to the position. No tear, 
no indignation, no heart-felt throb, no voice or gesture which be- 
fits an open and free heart. All instincts and spontaneity must 
be judged by supposed interests of a professorship. In such 
cases as this the man is a mere Jonah in the whale's belly. His 
professorship has swallowed his manhood ! Alas for the whale !" 

Of this attack on Sumner he said in the Star article of June 
12, " Silence must be Nationalized ": 



288 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" This deed stands absolutely alone in our history. It has not 
a single fellow! There have been brutal things, and cruel things, 
and mean things, and cowardly things, and wicked and inhuman 
wrongs, but nothing before that epitomized them all. With the 
exception of one or two papers, the whole South has accepted the 
act and made it representative ! It is no longer Brooks that 
struck Sumner ! He was the arm, but the whole South was the 
body ! And with one consent it is declared that for the crime 
of free speech it was done and deserved ! " 

In the meantime a new party, born of this conflict, was rapidly 
coming into power. Made up of elements apparently most di- 
verse, it was brought together by a common purpose and fused 
into one by a grand enthusiasm. There was, for a nucleus, the 
larger part of the old Free-Soil party, that had been in existence 
since 1842; then came Abolitionists, of which there had been 
for years a sprinkling in all the Northern States ; seceders from 
the Whig party, called in New York State "Silver Grays," and 
from the Democratic party, called " Barnburners ; " and a mul- 
titude of others, a daily increasing host, vital in every member 
with the spirit of the hour. Combining some of the best ele- 
ments of all the parties, it had a breadth of power that no one 
party could have given it alone. While it had enough men of 
experience in affairs to secure wisdom of action, its recruits 
were for the most part young men, who brought the inspira- 
tion of their youth, their numbers, their hope, and their indigna- 
tion. After a preliminary mass convention in Pittsburgh on 
Washington's birthday, February 22, 1856, they met in Phila- 
delphia and adopted a platform of principles and nominated 
candidates for President and Vice-President. 

In this platform they gave their attention mostly to the great 
issue of supreme importance — that between liberty and slavery. 
Their action here was positive and unequivocal : no more slave 
territory ; no more coddling of slave institutions. Upon this plat- 
form it nominated John C. Fremont for its standard-bearer, and 
organized its hosts for the great presidential contest of that year. 

The party thus brought before the country had some great 
advantages over all rivals. The Whig party was already dead, 
although not yet fully conscious of the fact, and awaiting burial ; 
the Democratic party was inextricably associated, for weal or 
for woe, with the slave-power ; while the Know-Nothing party 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 289 

was but a mushroom, and a poisonous variety at that. On the 
other hand, this new organization was intensely alive. It had 
a definite object in view and was not afraid to avow it. It had 
the strength of intense moral conviction. Its cause gave oppor- 
tunity for inspiration and awakened the grandest enthusiasm. It 
was in harmony with the fundamental principles of our nation 
and the early struggles of our people. It was in sympathy with 
the great movement of the age in all lands. Its lengthening lines 
and the rising hosts of the Old World were parts of the same 
army. Its standard-bearer, by reason of his youth, adventurous 
career, and brilliant service, was well adapted to awaken a loyal 
and spirited following. It had nothing to conceal ; it had nothing 
to fear ; it carried with it the hopes of the nation and the world. 
Adopting the " Marseillaise," the greatest liberty song that was 
ever written, it adapted its own chorus to the music and sang 
at its meetings with boundless enthusiasm : 

" Arise, arise, ye braves ! 
And let your war-cry be, 
' Free speech, free press, 
Free soil, free men, 
Fremont, and victory ! ' " 

Mr. Beecher gave himself unreservedly to this contest : 
" Well, of course we felt all aflame. My church voted me 
all the time that I thought to be required to go out into the com- 
munity and speak and canvass the State of New York. I went 
into that canvass, spoke twice and often three times a week, 
having the whole day to myself — that is, making all the speeches 
that were made. I was sent principally to what we called the 
Silver-Gray districts or counties — the old-time Whigs that were 
attempting to run a candidate between Fremont and Buchanan. 
I generally made a three hours' speech a day in the open air to 
audiences of from eight to ten thousand people. I felt at that 
time that it was very likely that I should sacrifice my life, or my 
voice at any rate, but I was willing to lay down either or both of 
them for that cause." 

Of Mr. Beecher's contributions to the literature of the cam- 
paign we can, for lack of space, give but few quotations, and 
these only as they afford an idea of the humorous and enthusi- 
astic manner in which he stood up for his candidate. In the 



29O BIOGRAPHY OF 

close scrutiny of private life, which is so marked a feature of 
presidential campaigns, it had been learned that John C. Fre- 
mont and Jessie Benton had fallen in love with each other, and, 
her father not approving of his daughter's selection, the two 
lovers had made a runaway match of it, and in their haste had 
been married by a Roman Catholic priest. This escapade was 
being used against the candidate by the opposite party, not be- 
cause he ran away with the fair Jessie — the ballot of the average 
American voter would as likely be won as lost by such an exhi- 
bition of youthful enterprise — but because it helped to prove,, 
what was persistently claimed, that he was a Roman Catholic. 
In answer Mr. Beecher wrote a vigorous article disproving the 
charge, and justifying the groom in securing the services of any 
one competent to perform the marriage ceremony, closing with 
these words : " Like a true lover and gallant man, Fremont said 
that he did not care who married him, so that it was done quick 
and strong. If we had been in Colonel Fremont's place we 
would have been married if it had required us to walk through a 
row of priests and bishops as long as from Washington to Rome, 
ending up with the Pope himself ! " 

He ridicules the persistency with which certain newspapers 
returned to the attack upon Fremont on the assumed ground of 
his being a Roman Catholic, with the story of " The Dog Noble 
and the Empty Hole," that probably did as good campaign ser- 
vice as any story that was ever written : 

" The first summer which we spent in Lenox we had along 
a very intelligent dog named Noble. He was learned in many 
things, and by his dog-lore excited the undying admiration of 
all the children. But there were some things which Noble could 
never learn. Having on one occasion seen a red squirrel run into 
a hole in a stone wall, he could not be persuaded that he was not 
there for evermore ! . . . 

" The intense enthusiasm of the dog at that hole can hardly 
be described. He filled it full of barking. He pawed and 
scratched as if undermining a bastion. Standing off at a little 
distance, he would pierce the hole with a gaze as intense and fixed 
as if he were trying magnetism on it. Then, with tail extended 
and every hair thereon electrified, he would rush at the empty 
hole with a prodigious onslaught. 

" This imaginary squirrel haunted Noble night and day. The 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 29 1 

very squirrel himself would run up before his face into the tree, 
and, crouched in a crotch, would sit silently watching the whole 
process of bombarding the empty hole with great sobriety and 
relish. But Noble would allow of no doubts. His conviction 
that that hole had a squirrel in it continued unshaken for six 
weeks. When all other occupations failed this hole remained to 
him. When there were no more chickens to harry, no pigs to 
bite, no cattle to chase, no children to romp with, no expeditions 
to make with the grown folks, and when he had slept all that his 
dog-skin would hold, he would walk out of the yard, yawn and 
stretch himself, and then look wistfully at the hole, as if thinking 
to himself : ' Well, as there is nothing else to do, I may as well 
try that hole again ! ' 

" We had almost forgotten this little trait until the conduct 
of the New York Express in respect to Colonel Fremont's re- 
ligion brought it ludicrously to mind again. Colonel Fremont 
is, and always has been, as sound a Protestant as John Knox 
ever was. He was bred in the Protestant faith and has never 
changed. . . . 

" But the Express, like Noble, has opened on this hole in the 
wall, and can never be done barking at it. Day after day it re- 
sorts to this empty hole. When everything else fails this re- 
source remains. There they are indefatigably — the Express and 
Noble — a church without a Fremont, and a hole without a squir- 
rel in it ! . . . 

" We never read the Express nowadays without thinking in- 
voluntarily, ' Goodness ! the dog is letting off at that hole again.' " 

The election of 1856 resulted, as is well known, in the choice 
of James Buchanan for President. Since his policy was dictated 
by the same power behind the throne as that of Mr. Pierce, it 
was, of course, not unlike that of his predecessor ; and this era in 
the great conflict which opened with the repeal of the Missouri 
Compromise closes with the Administration at Washington more 
than ever submissive to the demands of the South. But it also 
closes with the right wing of the great army of liberty, whose 
lines reached from the Atlantic to the roots of the Rocky Moun- 
tains, securely entrenched and holding its position, and with con- 
tinually increasing numbers, barring farther aggressions of slavery 
for ever. 



CHAPTER XV. 

Remarkable experiences — The Edmonson Sisters — Pinky and her Freedom- 
Ring — Slave Auction in Plymouth Church — John Brown — The Wrong 
and Right Way — Election of Abraham Lincoln — Secession — Buchan- 
an's Fast. 

WHILE these larger public matters were engaging his atten- 
tion there was an equally engrossing field of private ac- 
tivity in which he was constantly engaged, and which 
developed into some very peculiar and remarkable experiences. 
As early as 1848 we find him conducting an auction sale, in 
New York City, of the two Edmonson sisters. ' 

This case at the time attracted wide attention. Two respecta- 
ble young women of light complexion, living in Washington City, 
had the misfortune to be born while the mother was a slave. 
After they had grown to womanhood they found that the former 
owner of their parent was about to sell them to a slave-dealer for 
exportation to New Orleans and the market. Despairing of being 
able to raise the exorbitant sum at which they were valued, and 
not knowing how to escape from a doom far more dreadful than 
death, they risked everything by going on board the Pearl 
schooner with seventy-seven others, in the hope of escaping 
to a land of liberty and purity. The ship was captured and they 
were hurried off to Slater's Den, Baltimore, and thence to New 
Orleans. By some most extraordinary providences they were 
brought back from New Orleans to Washington, and their sad 
case at length reached the ears of those who had hearts to feel 
and means to save. A meeting was held in the Tabernacle 
October 23, at which Dr. Dowling and Mr. Beecher spoke with 
so much effect that $2,200 were raised and the captives were 
free. Mr. Beecher's speech is described by an eye-witness, him- 
self a minister, as beyond anything he has ever heard before or 
since. He extemporized there on the stage an auction of a Chris- 
tian slave. The enumeration of his qualities by the auctioneer, 
and the bids that followed, were given by the speaker in perfect 

character. He made the scene as realistic as one of Hogarth's 

292 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 



293 



pictures and as lurid as a Rembrandt. Physical excellences, men- 
tal, moral, and spiritual qualities, are each dwelt on with an em- 
phasis and moving effect that proved that he would have made 
a capital auctioneer if he had chosen that business. 

" And more than all that, gentlemen, they say he is one of 
those praying Methodist niggers ; who bids ? A thousand — fif- 
teen hundred — two thousand — twenty-five hundred ! Going, 
going ! last call ! Gone ! " 

The audience were wrought up to a perfect frenzy of excite- 
ment while that picture was being drawn, and when real contri- 
butions instead of imaginary bids were called for, the sum was 
easily raised and the girls were free. He says of it : "I think 
that of all the meetings that I have attended in my life, for a 
panic of sympathy I never saw one that surpassed that. I have 
seen a great many in my day. An amount of money was sub- 
scribed, and they were bought and set free. The mother was a 
very old woman. She had been a nurse of a great Richmond 
lawyer whose name has died out of my memory. He owed his 
conversion to her. He was famous in the days of Webster." 

We have lying before us as we write a little leather-covered 
account-book, soiled and worn by use, which has upon its first 
pages letters from various humanitarians — William Lloyd Gar- 
rison being among the number — recommending to the Christian 
public one Pomona Brice, who "is engaged in collecting money to 
secure the ransom of her daughter and two grandchildren who 
are scattered somewhere in North Carolina, Mississippi, Ala- 
bama, and Missouri." The names of subscribers follow, with the 
sums subscribed — ranging from twenty-five cents to ten dollars — 
among which stands the familiar autograph " H. W. Beecher, if 
the whole is made up, five dollars." Receipts from the different 
savings-banks where she had deposited the money ; a letter from 
her lawyer to Mr. Beecher telling him that at her request he 
had examined the laws of the above-mentioned States, and found 
them all against her ; a bill for his services and a judgment of the 
court against her for $100, all either directed or entrusted to Mr. 
Beecher, give us an inkling of another kind of work that wore 
upon his time, sympathy, and purse. 

Not only did he help by his subscriptions some poor mother 
or grandmother to buy the liberty of her children or grand- 
children, but sometimes brought the slave upon Plymouth pulpit 



294 REV - HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

and raised the money for its redemption on the spot. A hand- 
ful of letters in our possession gives the preliminaries to such a 
transaction. 

One is from a Mr. Blake, who has called on the " nigger 
trader " and obtained the refusal of the child for $900, and has 
also " obtained four or five good names to a bond for the pay- 
ment of the money or return of the child. When I told the 
grandmother what I had done the poor old soul cried for joy. 
' God bless you ! ' she said. ' I will sit up all night to get you 
some breakfast. You have saved my child.' " Then comes a 
hitch in the proceedings. A partner to the trader before spoken 

of appeared. He hated " the d Abolitionists, and would 

not let the child go among them." " Do you not think some- 
thing could be done without the child ? She has light flaxen 
hair. Her owner said I would easily get her on the cars, for no 
one would know her from a white child- The grandmother has 
purchased herself. She has also saved up about $200 to sup- 
port her in her old age. She is willing to give this. If we take 
it we shall want $700 more. If you can do anything, in God's 

name do it and save the child. 

"G. Faulkner Blake." 

In some way, the letters do not tell us how, the difficulties 
were overcome. The permission of the joint owners of this flax- 
en-haired girl was obtained, bonds were given to the railroads as 
well as the owners to secure them from loss in case this property 
should not be returned, and the child was brought to the auction- 
block of Plymouth pulpit and was bought for liberty. 

The following is Mr. Beecher's farther account of this matter : 
"Before the passage of the Red Sea, before the escape of the 
Israelites (in this country, not in Egypt), I was accustomed, from 
time to time, to buy slaves here ; and it was thrown up that this 
was one of the best slave-auction places anywhere to be found — 
that better prices were obtained for slaves that were put up for 
sale here than for any others. Some thought there was an in- 
consistency in it. I did not. I was always glad, at suitable 
times, as often as was proper, to bring before you living men and 
women, and let them stand and look you in the face, that you 
might see what sort of creatures slaves were made of. I was 
glad by every means in my power to arouse men's feelings 
against the abomination of slavery, which I hated with an unut- 




295 



296 BIOGRAPHY OF- 

terable hatred, and which I hate still in memory as much as then 
I hated it in substance and in fact. 

" Well, at one time there was a girl named • Pink,' or ' Pinky,* 
brought here. She came through the agency of G. Faulkner 
Blake, a brother of one of our own members. He was studying 
in the Episcopal Seminary at Alexandria, I believe. He learned 
from her old grandmother that ' Pinky,' who was too fair and 
beautiful a child for her own good, was to be taken away from 
the grandmother and sent South. 

" To make a long story short, those interested in the girl 
wrote me to see if I could purchase her. I replied, ' I cannot 
unless you send her North ' ; and there was trouble in bringing 
her here. I wrote that I would be responsible for her, and that 
she would be lawfully purchased or sent back. 

" I remember that the pen-keeper paid me a compliment 
which I shall never forget, by saying that if Henry Ward Beecher 
had given his word he considered it better than a bond. So she 
was brought here and placed upon this platform ; and the rain 
never fell faster than the tears fell from many of you that were 
here. The scene was one of intense enthusiasm. The child was 
bought, and overbought. The collection that was taken on the 
spot was enough, and more than enough, to purchase her. It so 
happened (it is not wrong to mention now) that a lady known 
to literary fame as Miss Rose Terry was present ; and as, like 
many others, she had not with her as much money as she wanted 
to give, she took a ring off from her hand and threw it into the 
contribution-box. That ring I took and put on the child's hand, 
and said to her, i Now remember that this is your freedom-ring.' 
Her expression, as she stood and looked at it for a moment, was 
pleasing to behold; and Eastman Johnson, the artist, was so 
much interested in the occurrence that he determined to repre- 
sent it on canvas, and he painted her looking at her freedom- 
ring ; and I have a transcript of the picture now at my house in 
the parlor, and any of you can see it by asking. 

" So the girl was redeemed. She went back South after her 
redemption ; but she was in the North for a time and received 
some rudiments of education. At length I lost sight of her until 
1864, I think, when she was at Chief- Justice Chase's, and I re- 
ceived word that she wished to see me. 

" It seems that ' Pinky ' was not a good enough name for 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 297 

her when she was free, though it was when she was a slave ; so 
they mixed things and called her ' Ward,' after my name, and 
' Rose,' after the name of this lady; and ever since her name 
has been Rose Ward — a very nice name indeed. She then had 
grown to be a young woman, and was very fair. I supposed she 
would probably live and die in labor to support herself and her 
grandmother, who was becoming infirm ; but it seems that she 
has shown uncommon intelligence, and has manifested a very 
earnest desire to become a laborer for her people, and she is to 
be educated and to become a teacher and missionary among 
them. 

" Now, it suits me exactly to have this child brought out of 
slavery, redeemed on this platform, and grow up and develop a 
Christian disposition, and go back and labor for her people. She 
does not know anything about it, but if we can raise $150 she 
shall have a year's schooling in the Lincoln University at Wash- 
ington. It seems to me as though there was poetic justice and 
fitness in it. As you redeemed her in the first instance from 
slavery, in the second instance you must redeem her from igno- 
rance by contributing the amount necessary to send her a year to 
that university." And it was done. 

An account of another is found in the weekly press : 

" Slave Made Free in Plymouth Church, June i, 1856. — 

" There was never a more thrilling exemplification of Gospel 
principles than last Sabbath morning, June 1, in Rev. H. W. 
Beecher's church, Brooklyn. Mr. Beecher preached from Luke 
x. 27. 

" Just after announcing the last hymn he stepped to the plat- 
form and said : 'lam about to do a thing which I am not wont 
to do, which I have never done before upon this day ; and, in 
order that you may have no scruples about it, I will preface it by 
reading what the Lord Jesus Christ says of the Sabbath and its 
duties : " And it came to pass also on another Sabbath that 
He entered into the synagogue and taught : and there was a 
man whose right hand was withered. . . . And He said to the 
man which had the withered hand, Rise up, and stand forth in 
the midst. And he arose and stood forth. Then said Jesus unto 
them, I will ask you one thing : Is it lawful on the Sabbath days 
to do good, or to do evil ? to save life, or to destroy it ? And look- 



298 BIOGRAPHY OF 

ing around about upon them all, He said unto the man, Stretch 
forth thy hand. And he did so; and his hand was restored whole 
as the other." 

" ' Some two weeks since I had a letter from Washington 
informing me that a young woman had been sold by her own 
father to go South — for what purpose you can imagine when you 
see her. She was purchased by a slave-trader for $1,200 ; and 
he, knowing her previous character and the circumstances of the 
case, was so moved with compassion that he offered to give her 
an opportunity to purchase her freedom. He himself gave 
towards it $100, and persuaded a friend and another slave-trader 
to give each $100 more. So much of good is there in the lowest 
of men ! He allowed her to go to Washington to solicit aid from 
the Free- State men there, and she succeeded in obtaining $400 
more. I was then applied to, to know if we would do anything 
to raise the remaining $500. I answered we would do nothing 
unless the woman could come here. After much hesitation on 
the part of her master she was allowed to visit New York, giving 
her word of honor that she would return to Richmond if the 
money were not raised ' ; and, going to the platform stairs, ' Come 
up here, Sarah, and let us all see you,' said he. 

" A young woman rose from an adjacent seat, and, ascending 
the steps, sank down, embarrassed and apparently overcome by 
her feelings, in the nearest chair. She was of medium size and 
neatly dressed. The white blood of her father might be traced 
in her regular features and high, thoughtful brow, while her 
complexion and wavy hair betrayed her slave mother. 'And 
this/ said Mr. Beecher, 'is a marketable commodity. Such as 
she are put into one balance and silver into the other. She is 
now legally free, but she is bound by a moral obligation which 
is stronger than any law. I reverence woman. For the sake of 
the love I bore my mother I hold her sacred, even in the lowest 
position, and will use every means in my power for her uplifting. 
What will you do now? May she read her liberty in your eyes? 
Shall she go out free? Christ stretched forth His hand and the 
sick were restored to health ; will you stretch forth your hands 
and give her that without which life is of little worth ? Let the 
plates be passed and we will see ! ' There was hardly a dry eye 
in the church ; and amidst tears and earnest lookings at the poor 
woman, who sat with downcast eyes, the plates went around. 



REV. J/EJVRY WARD BEECHER. 299 

Every purse was in requisition, and as the bills were thrown 
down Mr. Beecher said : ' I see the plates are heaping up. Re- 
member every dollar you give is the step of a weary pilgrim to- 
ward liberty, and that Christ has said : tl Inasmuch as ye have 
done it unto one of the least of these ye have done it unto Me ! " ' 
At this Mr. Lewis Tappan rose and said, 'There need be no anx- 
iety about the matter ; some gentlemen had just now pledged 
themselves to make up the deficiency, whatever it might be.' 

" Then she was free ! And when Mr. Beecher told her so and 
announced it to the great congregation, there was an involuntary 
burst of applause. It was in the church, upon the Sabbath day, 
but it was no desecration — rather it was echoed by richer ac- 
clamation in heaven ! As it subsided Mr. Beecher said : ' When 
the old Jews went up to their solemn feasts they made the moun- 
tains round about Jerusalem ring with their shouts. I do not 
approve of an unholy clapping in the house of God, but when a 
good deed is well done it is not wrong to give an outward ex- 
pression of our joy. . . .' 

" He then read the closing hymn, saying, as he handed her 
the book, ' We shall sing this hymn as we never have sung a hymn 
before, and she will sing it too.' This was the hymn : 

" ' Do not I love Thee, O my Lord ? 

Behold my heart and see ; 

And turn the dearest idol out 

That dares to rival Thee.' 

" ■ Hast Thou a lamb in all Thy flock 
I would disdain to feed? 
Hast Thou a foe before whose face 
I fear Thy cause to plead ?' 



"The blessing was pronounced and the meeting was over; 
but many lingered to know the amount of the contribution, and 
when it was found that $783 had been raised, so that not only 
she but her child of two years old could be redeemed, the ap- 
plause burst forth anew. 

"In the plates were several articles of jewelry, thrown in by 
those who had no money with them or were unable to give any- 
thing else. 



300 BIOGRAPHY OP 

" Thus may Plymouth Church be consecrated. Verily ' it is 
lawful to do good on the Sabbath day.' " 

A handful of photographs of children, white and beautiful, 
who had been set free, have come to my hand with the above let- 
ters. Having to do with white-faced, flaxen-haired children born 
under the curse of slavery ; with mothers carrying their little ac- 
count-books from house to house, gathering funds wherewith to 
accomplish the apparently hopeless task of first finding their chil- 
dren who had been swept away from them in the black maelstrom 
of slavery, and then of purchasing them ; of grandmothers who 
wept for joy at the prospect of saving their grandchildren, and 
willingly surrendered all the money which they had laid aside for 
their old age if it could be accomplished, would make a man 
tender toward the victims and hard against the system which 
caused their trouble. 

Through this course of training he walked in these years, his 
heart now dissolved in tears and now hot with righteous indigna- 
tion. No compromise, no surrender, no betrayal, no yielding, 
but the destruction of slavery and the salvation of the Union. 

The Kansas and Nebraska troubles had resulted in more than 
establishing certain theories or in deciding the status of portions 
of our territory. It had intensified the feeling in both sections of 
our country, and men were being irreconcilably divided upon the 
subject of slavery. Out of these troublous times sprang John 
Brown, originally a farmer, born in the northern part of Con- 
necticut, and emigrating to Ohio when a child. In 1854 his four 
elder sons migrated to Kansas, joining with the thousands from 
the North to make that a free State and to secure homes for 
themselves and their families. Plundered and harassed, they 
wrote to their father to procure arms. To make sure that they 
should get these he went with them. This was his introduction 
into Kansas. We have no design of following out his history in 
detail, but only claim that his fanatical zeal and his unreasonable 
expectations were the product of the times in which he lived and 
the experiences which he suffered, acting upon a temperament 
peculiarly unselfish, heroic, and religious. Enough for us is it to 
know that his course led him, with an army of sixteen men, to the 
capture of Harper's Ferry and to a conflict with the whole State 
of Virginia, in fact with the power of the whole United States 
government, and ultimately to the scaffold. His courage, his 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 3OI 

calmness, his undoubting faith in the future deliverance of the 
slaves, crowned by his heroic death, made his name the war-cry 
of the future legions of the loyal States, who sang as they 
marched : 

" John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, 
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, 
But his soul is marching on." 

The attack on Harper's Ferry was made October 17. On 
Sunday evening, October 30, Henry Ward Beecher preached upon 
" The Harper's Ferry Tragedy," and gives his judgment of the 
principal actor in the following language : 

" An old man, kind at heart, industrious, peaceful, went forth 
with a large family of children, to seek a new home in Kansas. 
That infant colony held thousands of souls as noble as liberty 
ever inspired or religion enriched. A great scowling slave State, 
its nearest neighbor, sought to tread down this liberty-loving 
colony and to dragoon slavery into it by force of arms. The 
armed citizens of another State crossed the State lines, destroyed 
the freedom of the ballot-box, prevented a fair expression cf pub- 
lic sentiment, corruptly usurped law-making power and ordained 
by fraud laws as infamous as the sun ever saw, assaulted its in- 
fant settlements with armed hordes, ravaged the fields, destroyed 
harvests and herds, and carried death to a multitude of cabins. 
The United States government had no marines for this occasion ! 
No Federal troops were posted by cars night and day for the 
poor, the weak, the grossly-wronged men in Kansas. There was 
an army there that unfurled the banner of the Union, but it was 
on the side of the wrong-doers, not on the side of the injured. 

" It was in this field that Brown received his impulse. A ten- 
der father, whose life was in his sons' life, he saw his first-born 
seized like a felon, chained, driven across the country, crazed by 
suffering and heat, beaten by the officer in charge like a dog, and 
long lying at death's door ! Another noble boy, without warning, 
without offence, unarmed, in open day, in the midst of the city, 
was shot dead ! No justice sought out the murderers. No 
United States attorney was despatched in hot haste. No marines 
or soldiers aided the wronged and weak ! 

" The shot that struck the child's heart crazed the father's 
brain. Revolving his wrongs and nursing his hatred of that 



302 BIOGRAPHY OP 

deadly system that breeds such contempt of justice and humani- 
ty, at length his phantoms assume a slender form and organize 
such an enterprise as one might expect from a man whom grief 
had bereft of good judgment. He goes to the heart of a slave 
State : one man — and sixteen followers ! He seizes two thousand 
brave Virginians and holds them in duress. 

"When a great State attacked a handful of weak colonies the 
government and nation were torpid ; but when seventeen men 
attacked a sovereign State, then Maryland arms, and Virginia 
arms, and the United States government arms, and they three 
rush against seventeen men ! 

" Travellers tell us that the Geysers of Iceland — those singular 
boiling springs of the North — may be transported with fury by 
plucking up a handful of grass or turf and throwing them into 
the springs. The hot springs of Virginia are of the same kind ! 
A handful of men was thrown into them, and what a boiling there 
has been ! 

" But meanwhile no one can fail to see that this poor, child- 
bereft old man is the manliest of them all. Bold, unflinching, 
honest, without deceit or dodge, refusing to take technical advan- 
tages of any sort, but openly avowing his principles and motives, 
glorying in them in danger and death as much as when in securi- 
ty — that wounded old father is the most remarkable figure in this 
whole drama. The governor, the officers of the State, and all 
the attorneys are pigmies compared to him. 

" I deplore his misfortunes. I sympathize with his sorrows. 
I mourn the hiding or obscuration of his reason. I disapprove 
of his mad and feeble schemes. I shrink from the folly of the 
bloody foray, and I shrink, likewise, from all the anticipations of 
that judicial bloodshed which, doubtless, ere long will follow — for 
when was cowardice ever magnanimous ? They will kill the man, 
not for treason, but for proving them cowards ! 

" By and by, when men look back and see without prejudice 
that whole scene, they will not be able to avoid saying: 'What 
must be the measure of manhood in a scene where a crazed old 
man stood head and shoulders above those who had their whole 
reason ? What is average citizenship when a lunatic is a hero?" 

He also availed himself of this opportunity to show the wrong 
way and the right way in our treatment of this whole question 
of slavery. I can only mention the heads, but they so far outline 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 303 

his whole principle of action during the war that I give them that 
his position may be understood : 

" 1st. We have no right to treat the citizens of the South with 
acrimony and bitterness because they are involved in a system of 
wrong-doing." 

" 2d. The breeding of discontent among the bondmen of 
our land is not the way to help them." 

" 3d. No relief will be carried to the slaves or to the South as 
a body by any individual or organized plans to carry them off or 
to incite them to abscond." 

As to the right way : 

" 1 st. If we would benefit the African at the South we must 
begin at home. No one can fail to see the inconsistency between 
our treatment of those amongst us who are in the lower walks of 
life and our professions of sympathy for the Southern slaves. 
How are the free colored people treated at the North ? They 
are almost without education, with but little sympathy for igno- 
rance. They are refused the common rights of citizenship which 
the whites enjoy. They cannot even ride in the cars of our city 
railroads. They are snuffed at in the house of God, or tolerated 
with ill-disguised disgust. Can the black man be a mason in 
New York ? Let him be employed as a journeyman, and every 
Irish lover of liberty that carries the hod or trowel would leave 
at once or compel him to leave ! Can the black man be a car- 
penter ? There is scarcely a carpenter's shop in New York in 
which a journeyman would continue to work if a black man were 
employed in it. Can the black man compete in the common in- 
dustries of life ? There is scarcely one in which he can engage. 
He is crowded down, down, down, through the most menial call- 
ings, to the bottom of society. We tax them, and then refuse to 
allow their children to go to our public schools. We tax them, 
and then refuse to sit by them in God's house. We heap upon 
them moral obloquy more atrocious than that which the master 
heaps upon the slave." 

" 2d. We must quicken all the springs of feeling in the free 
States in behalf of human liberty, and create a public sentiment 
based upon truth and true manhood." 

" 3d. By all the ways consistent with a fearless assertion of 
truth, we must maintain sympathy and kindness toward the South. 
If, in view of the wrongs of slavery, you say that you do not care 



304 BIOGRAPHY OF 

for the master but only the slave, I reply that you should care 
for both master and slave ! If you do not care for the fate of the 
wrong-doing white man, / do care for the fate of the wrong-do- 
ing white man ! But even though your sympathy were only for 
the slave, then for his sake you ought to set your face against, 
and discountenance anything like, an insurrectionary spirit." 

" 4th. We are to leave no pains untaken, through the Christian 
conscience of the South, to give to the slave himself a higher 
moral status." 

" 5th. The few virtues which shall lead inevitably to eman- 
cipation are to be established and insisted upon — the right 
of chastity in the woman, unblemished household love, and the 
right of parents to their children. -The moment these three 
stand secure, that moment slavery will have its death-blow 
struck." 

" 6th. And, lastly, among the means to be employed for pro- 
moting the liberty of the slave we must not fail to include the 
power of true Christian prayer. When slavery shall cease it 
will be by such instruments and influences that shall exhibit 
God's hand and heart in the work. May He, in His own way 
and time, speed the day ! " 

With such radical yet conservative and kindly speech, bring- 
ing home to his audience their own deficiencies and pointing out 
the way that must be taken, did he temper and direct the hot 
passion of those fiery days. 

The heat occasioned by the John Brown raid in the fall of 
1859 was not cooled by the after-events that occurred both in and 
out of Congress during the following winter ; and the country 
came to nominating its candidates in i860 in a state of the most 
intense feeling. Four parties were in the field, each representing 
as its essential characteristic some phase of feeling towards sla- 
very. Among them stood the Republican party, with a well- 
defined purpose, clearly understood and openly declared — no 
interference with and no extension of slavery. Abraham Lincoln 
was its nominee for President. Mr. Beecher had met him in 
1859 when he came to New York to deliver his speech at Cooper 
Institute, and, with his quick perception of the ability of men, 
and already well acquainted with his record, had placed confi- 
dence in this tall, gaunt Westerner from the first. He had 
doubted the policy of nominating Mr. Seward, and one of his 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 305 

first interviews with a member of the New York delegation, who 
had labored earnestly but vainly for his nomination, is thus de- 
scribed : " With a laugh that was almost a roar he burst into the 
editorial room where Mr. Raymond sat, his chair tilted upon its 
two fore legs, and, grasping him cordially, heartily, vigorously, 
said : ' Young man, I know the people of this country at heart 
better than you do. Your friend Seward has too much head 
and too little heart to succeed in any such crisis as this.' 

' ' And yours,' replied Mr. Raymond, ' I fear, has too much 
heart and too little head for such a crisis as will assuredly be pre- 
cipitated.' 

' Trust, then,' replied Mr. Beecher, 'in God, and keep your 
powder dry.' " 

For the election of their nominee Mr. Beecher labored with 
pen and voice to the utmost of his ability. His sermons Sunday 
evenings often had reference to the great questions of the day. 
His lectures of this period were little more than political ad- 
dresses, and by his Star Papers in the Independent, which were 
largely copied in other papers, he made his views known to the 
reading public throughout the land. Believing that the election 
of Abraham Lincoln was of the utmost importance, he gave him- 
self unreservedly to make it an accomplished fact, and made him- 
self as obnoxious to the timid and time-serving as he was ad- 
mirable to the opposite party. Of this period he says : "We next 
had to flounder through the quicksands of four infamous years 
under President Buchanan, in which senators sworn to the Con- 
stitution were plotting to destroy that Constitution ; in which the 
members of the Cabinet, who drew their pay month by month, 
used their official position, by breach of public trust and oath of 
allegiance, to steal arms, to prepare fortifications, and make ready 
disruption and war. The most astounding spectacle the world 
ever saw was then witnessed — a great people paying men to sit 
in the places of power and offices of trust to betray them." 

Most portentous events followed the election. State after 
State in the South called their conventions and passed decrees 
of secession, in every case, except in South Carolina, by the jug- 
glery of political leaders, in spite of the popular vote. Repre- 
sentatives withdrew from the House, senators from the Senate, 
and members from the Cabinet, and flocked to Montgomery, 
Ga,, where a rebel government was being organized. The most 



306 BIOGRAPHY OF 

specious arguments were urged in justification of secession, were 
substantially admitted even by so excellent an authority as the 
New York Tribune, and the right to coerce a sovereign State, as 
well as the expediency of the attempt, was denied by a large por~ 
tion of the Northern press. Preparations to make secession 
successful, if resisted, were made openly, while the denial of the 
right to prevent the same tied the hands of the government and 
left it powerless in the toils of its enemies. In the meantime 
different schemes of conciliation, all amounting to some species 
of concession or compromise, were advanced both in and out 
of Congress, and urged to the very utmost possible limit of 
forbearance and kindness. Against "peace at any price " and 
all patched- up compromises Mr. Beecher, together with a multi- 
tude of others of like feeling at the North, threw his influence. 

His Thanksgiving sermon this year was upon this topic : 
"Against a Compromise of Principle." He recounts the com- 
mon but abundant blessings of the year, and gathers assurance 
that they are from God on the following testimony : 

" All the sons of God rejoice and all good men rejoice. It 
needs but one element to complete the satisfaction. If we could 
be sure that this is God's mercy, meant for good and tending 
thereto, we should have a full cup to-day. That satisfaction is 
not denied us. The Mayor of New York, in a public proclama- 
tion, in view of this prodigal year that has heaped the poor man's 
house with abundance, is pleased to say that there is no occasion 
apparent to him for thanksgiving. We can ask no more. When 
bad men grieve at the state of public affairs, good men should 
rejoice. When infamous men keep fast, righteous men should 
have thanksgiving. God reigns and the devil trembles. Amen. 
Let us rejoice ! " 

He then describes the true nature of the compromise that is 
asked, and shows the impossibility of making any that shall be 
satisfactory to either side : 

"We are told that Satan appears under two forms — that when 
he has a good, fair field he is out like a lion, roaring and seeking 
whom he may devour ; but that when he can do nothing more in 
that way he is a serpent and sneaks in the grass. And so it is 
slavery open, bold, roaring, aggressive, or it is slavery sneaking 
in the grass and calling itself compromise. It is the same devil 
under either name. If by compromise is only meant forbearance ? 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 30 7 

kindness, well-wishing, conciliation, fidelity to agreements, a con- 
cession in things, not principles, why then we believe in compro- 
mise, only that is not compromise, interpreted by the facts of our 
past history. 

" We honestly wish no harm to the South or its people ; we 
honestly wish them all benefit. We will defend her coast ; we 
will guard her inland border from all vexations from without; and 
in good faith, in earnest friendship, in fealty to the Constitution, 
and in fellowship with the States, we will, and with growing ear- 
nestness to the end, fulfil every just duty, every honorable agree- 
ment, and every generous act within the limits of truth and honor; 
all that and no more — no more though the heavens fall ; no more 
if States unclasp their hands ; no more if they raise up violence 
against us — no more ! We have gone to the end." 

He did not agree with Mr. Lincoln in his hope that the South 
would be satisfied by the careful explanations given in his inaugu- 
ral, nor with Mr. Seward in his expectation that the difficulty 
would be settled in ninety days; but he did believe with all his 
heart that God was in the work, and that the trouble would be 
settled some day, and that it would be settled right. In the tur- 
moil of that turbulent time his mind was kept in perfect peace, 
because it was stayed on God. 

The Republican party was charged with having brought 
about this unhappy state of the country. This charge he answers 
in a sermon preached January 4, 1861, the day appointed by 
President Buchanan for Fasting and Prayer : 

"What is the errand of this day?' Why are we observing a 
sad Sabbath ? a day of humiliation ? a day of supplication ? It 
is for the strangest reason the world ever heard. It is because 
the spirit of liberty has so increased and strengthened among us 
that the government is in danger of being overthrown ! There 
never before was such an occasion for fasting, humiliation, and 
prayer ! Other nations have gone through revolutions for their 
liberties ; we are on the eve of a revolution to put down liberty ! 
Other people have thrown off their governments because too op- 
pressive ; ours is to be destroyed, if at all, because it is too full 
of liberty, too full of freedom. There never was such an event 
before in history. . . . Meanwhile we have had no one to stand 
up for order. Those who should have spoken in decisive autho- 
rity have been — afraid! Severer words have been used ; it i§ 



308 rev. henry ward beecher. 

enough for me to say only that in a time when God, and provi- 
dence, and patriotism, and humanity demanded courage, they 
had no response but fear. The heart has almost ceased to beat, 
and this government is like to die for want of pulsations at the 
centre. While the most humiliating fear paralyzes one part of the 
government, the most wicked treachery is found in other parts 
of it." 

So closes in shame and fear the second era of the great con- 
flict. 

" Buchanan's Fast " marks the lowest point of degradation 
the government of the United States ever reached — a point of 
abject fear of the consequences of its own sins, of feeble persis- 
tence in them, and of cowardice in applying the remedy for its 
trouble. 

Instead of abandoning its policy of falsehood and injustice, 
and making a manly use of the means still at hand to avert the 
threatening dangers, it held to its course, declared that it could 
do nothing more under the Constitution than to advise and re- 
monstrate with treason, and made a frantic appeal to the Chris- 
tians of the land to plead with Jehovah to save it from the inevi- 
table consequences of its folly and wickedness. 

It was a failure. The Call of the President to his kind of 
Fast awakened little response from the people. Another Procla- 
mation was ringing in their ears. It was that of the old prophet 
uttered centuries before. " Is not this the Fast that I have 
chosen ? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy 
burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every 
yoke ? " # 

This Fast of the Lord was rapidly approaching, and for it the 
people were getting ready. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

War Begun— Firing upon Fort Sumter — "The American Eagle as you 
want it " — Death of Col. Ellsworth — Equips his Sons — Personal Feeling 
yields to Patriotism — His House a Store-House of Military Supplies 
— Sends a Regiment as his Substitute — Our National Flag — The Camp, 
its Dangers and Duties — Bull Run — Becomes Editor of the Indepen- 
dent— SAwKaxoxy— The. Trent Affair— Fight, Tax— Soldiers or Ferrets- 
Characteristics as an Editor — One Nation, one Constitution, one Starry 
Banner— McClellan Safe, and Richmond too— Mildly Carrying on 
War — The Root of the Matter — The only Ground— A Queer Pulpit — 
President's Proclamation of Emancipation — Let come what will- 
Close of the Third Era. 

FOR five months the daily papers had borne for their promi- 
nent headlines, " The National Crisis," " Pro-Slavery Rebel- 
lion," " Pro-Slavery Revolution," " The War-Cloud." At 
length the issue of April 12, 1861, was headed, " The War Com- 
menced : The first Gun fired by Fort Moultrie against Fort 
Sumter " ; the next day, " Fort Sumter Fallen." 

Mr. Beecher was lecturing in Cincinnati when the tidings 
came North of the bombardment of Fort Sumter. The com- 
mittee who had charge of the lecture were alarmed, and, remem- 
bering the old pro-slavery riots of thirty years before, declared 
that it would be unsafe for him to deliver his lecture. He told 
them that to give that lecture was his object in coming to Cin- 
cinnati, and do it he should ; if not in a hall, then on the public 
street. With many misgivings on their part, he was permitted 
to go ahead, but so great was the fear of a riot that few attended. 
That night he turned his steps homeward. Eager to learn his 
opinion of the matter, we met him on the doorsteps. His oldest 
son, having left his position up the river, had stopped at a recruit- 
ing station on Broadway, already opened, and enlisted, and had 
then come home. Fearing something of the kind, the mother 
gave strict commands that he should not leave the house until his 
father's return — a command which he was the more ready to obey 
since the business had already been attended to. Naturally he 
felt some little solicitude as to what his father should say, and his 

3°9 



3 I O BIOGRAPHY OF 

first words were : " Father, may I enlist ? " and was answered : 
"If you don't I'll disown you." 

The next day was Sunday. The report of his sermon was 
headed thus : " Henry Ward Beecher on the Crisis : ' What will 
you do, stand still or go forward ? ' 

" The good people of Brooklyn have shared with us all the 
fears and anxiety of the past weeks. Yesterday there was, if pos- 
sible, a more dense mass of human beings than usual packed 
within the walls of Plymouth Church, and a more than ordinary 
curiosity on the part of strangers, and a more than customary 
solemnity pervading the congregation. It was manifestly the 
belief of all there that the pastor would not fail to improve the 
occasion by preaching to the people of this age upon the duties 
of the present trying hour, and that he would deal with so grand 
a subject in a manner befitting its character, its importance, and 
its universal occupation of the American mind. Nor were they 
disappointed. Mr. Beecher delivered a sermon from the text, 
' Speak to the children of Israel that they go forward.' " 

The above appeared in one of the daily papers. We have not 
time to give the synopsis of the reporter. The sermon was a 
careful review of the present condition of affairs and a sober 
counting the cost of both advance and retreat. 

" Peace can be had by two-thirds of the nation yielding to 
the one-third ; by legalizing the right of any discontented com- 
munity to rebel ; by changing our charter of universal freedom 
into a charter of deliberate oppression ; by becoming partners in 
slavery and ratifying this gigantic evil ; by surrendering all right 
of discussion, of debate or criticism. On these terms," he said, 
" we may have peace. 

" You can have your American eagle as you want it. If, with 
the South, you will strike out his eyes, then you shall stand well 
with Mr. Davis and Mr. Stephens, of the Confederate States ; if, 
with the Christians of the South, you will pluck off his wings, you 
shall stand well with the Southern churches ; and if, with the new 
peacemakers that have risen up in the North, you will pull out 
his tail-feathers, you shall stand well with the Society for the Pro- 
motion of National Unity ! But when you have stricken out his 
eyes, so that he can no longer see ; when you have plucked off his 
wings, so that he can no longer fly ; and when you have pulled 
Out his guiding tail-feathers, so that lie can no longer steer him- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEhCtfE~R. 31 I 

self, but rolls in the dirt, a mere buzzard — then will he be worth 
preserving? Such an eagle it is that they mean to depict upon 
the banner of America. 

"... So far as I myself am concerned, I utterly abhor 
peace on any such grounds. Give me war redder than blood 
and fiercer than fire, if this terrific infliction is necessary that I 
may maintain my faith in God, in human liberty, my faith of the 
fathers in the instruments of liberty, my faith in this land as the 
appointed abode and chosen refuge of liberty for all the earth ! 
War is terrible, but that abyss of ignominy is yet more terrible !" 

He then pointed out the steps that must be taken in the 
going forward. They were, deepening and cleansing our con- 
victions, making them more earnest and religious ; drawing the 
lines ; cherishing feelings of benevolence, and aiming at a peace 
built on foundations of God's immutable truth, so solid that no- 
thing can reach to unsettle it. 

To show the spirit which he cherished in those days, we can- 
not do better than give one of the familiar lecture-room discus- 
sions which were so frequent between him and his people. It 
was immediately after the death of Colonel Ellsworth, which 
took place May 21, 1861 : 

" Qucs. Will you please explain one point ? I am so much a 
natural man as not to be able to obey the injunction which calls 
upon me to love my enemies ; and when I stand on Broadway in 
New York, and see men in regiments which are bound for the 
field of battle, having been taken from their homes, their wives, 
their children, and all that is dear to them on earth, by the con- 
duct of miscreants, I cannot understand how you can have such 
feelings as you express. I wish you would speak on that sub- 
ject." 

" I have no doubt that the brother feels just as he says he 
does, and I have no doubt that I do not feel a bit so. When 
I consider the interests of God's advancing kingdom of justice, 
and judgment, and mercy, and purity, and truth, and liberty, I 
think that all the things in the earth are of no value at all in the 
comparison, and that the earth might melt with fervent heat, the 
elements dissolve, and the globe vanish away rather than that 
this kingdom should not prevail. ' Let God be true, but every 
man a liar.' Let the nations perish, let everything go, but let the 
eternal treasures of God — truth, liberty, mercy, judgment, and 



312 BIOGRAPHY OP 

purity — be preserved. I feel lifted up to a sovereign height of 
inspiration when I conceive of the majesty of these treasures, 
effluent from the heart of God, which He is seeking to embody in 
our time, in our earth, in this nation. Therefore, when I see 
justice put down I feel like a lion. When I see a great moral 
principle overborne there are no bounds to my indignation. 
When I see a great humanity trodden under foot I long to be a 
champion for it And when I look on the face of an ignorant, 
erring, wicked multitude, I think of a great many things be- 
sides. . . . 

" For the sake of these great principles I would give my life 
as quick as I would pour out a glass of water ; or I will do what 
is harder than that — I will keep it and use it for forty years, if 
God spares it, increasing its toil every year. I will make any 
sacrifice or perform any labor for the sake of a moral principle. 
But when I look at the South, other feelings besides those of 
vengeance are excited in me. Every one of those traitors is as 
wicked as you think, and more. The Floyds, the Davises, the 
Toombses, the Rhetts, and all such as they, are more wicked than 
we know ; and yet the Lord Jesus Christ is the Saviour held up 
for every such one. They are all immortal, they are all, like my- 
self, pilgrims toward the bourne of the eternal. And when I 
think how many ignorant creatures are led by those base men to 
do wicked things, half of the wickedness of which they do not 
know, I feel compassion for them and am sorry for them. If they 
array themselves against justice it is necessary that they should 
be overborne ; but not one blow more than is necessary for the 
defence of the principle assailed should be struck. We are not 
authorized to inflict vengeance. ' Vengeance is mine, I will re- 
pay, saith the Lord. Therefore, if thine enemy hunger, feed 
him ; if he thirst, give him drink ; for in so doing thou shalt 
heap coals of fire on his head.' About the use of every single 
sword and spear and ball needful to assert a divine principle 
there should be no squeamishness. I am for war just so far as it 
is necessary to vindicate a great moral truth. But one particle 
of violence beyond that is a flagrant treason against the law of 
love. And I can say to-night that I would go to war with every 
State in the Southern Confederacy, if called of God to join the 
army, and would hold them to the conflict till the cause of right 
was vindicated ; and that T could, at the same time, pray for 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 313 

those misguided men as easily as to-night I can pray for my own 
babes. I am as sorry for them as for any set of men in the 
world. I do not think I utter a prayer on any morning that I do 
not pray for them, and that God does not see my feeling of ten- 
derness and sorrow toward them. And that is not all. I regard 
them as citizens yet. I love this whole country. I love its past 
and its prospective history. God do so to me, and more also, if 
I ever cease to feel for them all, misguided though they be, as 
anxiously as for my own kin and brethren. We cannot afford 
to be very critical with wickedness. 

" However, there are some difficulties involved in this ques- 
tion. Colonel Ellsworth, who has just been murdered by one 
of these 'miscreants' of whom you speak, I knew well. I was 
thinking of my own sensations when I walked over from New 
York after hearing the sad news. Why, I was forty feet high ! 
I was scared, I grew so fast. I walked so lordly that every step 
seemed to have the weight of a mountain ; yet I did not feel the 
touch of the earth. For one hour I think I had enough volume 
of feeling to have swept away a continent. I was almost fright- 
ened at the turbulent and swelling tide within me, and I said : 
' Suppose my Master should come and say : My child, what are 
you doing with such feelings ? Where is My teaching ? What 
are you taking on yourself My supreme attribute for ? " Ven- 
geance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord." ' Is it not charm- 
ing how these texts will exorcise the devil ? I put that passage 
on my head as a crown, and I have felt as peaceful as a lamb 
ever since. And although it was very base and wicked for that 
man to murder Colonel Ellsworth as he did, I can say that had 
he not expiated his crime, and had the victim been my brother, I 
could still have forgiven him and prayed for him. 

" Now, my brethren, I am going to fight this battle right 
straight through from beginning to end, and not lose my Chris- 
tian feelings either. I am going to stick close to my Saviour. 
And, with regard to the past, I am not sorry for one sermon that 
I have preached among you, or that I have preached during the 
last twenty years of my life. If the question were put to me to- 
night, ' When you look back upon your public life and see what 
you have done to bring about the present issue, are you not sorry 
for the ground you have taken ? ' I would say, No. I bless God 
for every word I have spoken and every influence I have exerted 



3 i 4 BIOGRAPHY OF 

in that direction. Knowing all that was to be, I would do over 
again all that I have done if the same state of things existed, 
only my little finger should be as heavy as my loins have been. 

" Now that the time of conflict has come, we must accept it. 
I mean to go through it, and you shall ; and I pray God that the 
whole anointed Church at the North may, bearing the banner of 
Christ along with the banner of our country. The stars over us 
shall not be brighter and purer than those that we carry into this 
very conflict. We have had examples enough to know that even 
in such a desperate case as civil war a man may be a Christian. 
I thank God that praying men have gone into the army from 
this church. Every day and night there is a prayer-meeting 
in our camp, and there will be to the end. And I believe that 
among our soldiers are those who, if they saw the bitterest and 
most blasphemous of the enemy suffering and dying, would re- 
lieve their sufferings by kind offices and soothe their last mo- 
ments by comforting words. God grant that it may be so, and 
that, both in the service of the country and in the service of the 
Lord Jesus Christ, they may be true soldiers ! " 

It is impossible to describe, or even, in our time, to conceive, 
the fervor of patriotism that followed the firing upon Fort Sum- 
ter. Patriotic meetings were held in nearly every village of the 
North, and the raising of flag-poles with their accompanying ex- 
ercises was the order of the day. A monster mass-meeting was 
held in Union Square, New York, over which John A. Dix 
presided, and where the flag which had been lowered at Sumter 
was displayed. The attack on the Massachusetts regiment in 
Baltimore as it hastened to the defence of Washington deep- 
ened and increased the excitement. The ranks of military com- 
panies already organized were speedily filled, and the young men 
met, in most of our Northern cities, week by week for military 
drill. A squad of these was formed in Brooklyn. Some fif- 
teen of us wanted to go to the front, and offered ourselves to 
one of the New York regiments, but the offer was refused with 
thanks. Their ranks were full and they had no place for us. 
Hearing of this, Mr. Beecher, who took a deep interest in this 
whole matter and used to attend our drills, proposed that two of 
us, his own son and one who expected to belong to his family, 
should join a cavalry regiment then being enlisted in New York. 
He gave us each a horse, brought us home our equipment of 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 315 

pistols, bowie-knives, etc., and, the next day, went with us to New 
York to see us enlist ; but the enlisting officer had received no- 
tice from Washington the day before to accept no more recruits 
— cavalry regiments were not thought to be necessary for the 
ninety days' struggle ; and so we were refused. One of us went 
to Riker's Island, and, after a month of waiting, was able to get 
into service; the other, having just finished his theological 
course, and having for weeks been importuned by a church to 
become its pastor, concluded that it was God's will that he 
should preach, left the city, and went to work. 

There was great variety of work to be done. No need now of 
efforts to arouse the public mind — the firing upon Fort Sumter 
had done that ; no need now of urging men to the front — the 
young men of the nation had formed into companies and regi- 
ments faster than the government was willing to accept them. 
Illinois asked permission to furnish all the men that were re- 
quired. But another work pressed upon heart and hand. Homes 
at the North were being made desolate, not only by the absence 
but by the death of their loved ones. Tidings began to reach 
us of what afterwards seemed skirmishes, but were important 
battles in those days — Big Bethel, Newport News, and others; and 
the list of the dead, small to what it afterwards became, carried 
with it then, as always, sorrow and heart-break. The bodies of 
fallen sons and brothers, picked up on the battle-field or gathered 
from the hospitals, covered with the stars and stripes, were being 
borne through the streets of our cities on the way to bereaved 
homes, and the people needed comforting. Then it was that 
the words of one perfectly assured of the justice of the cause, 
that it was of God, and that those who upheld their country's 
flag were doing His work, and who viewed life and death as 
only and equally desirable when they accomplished His will, 
rang out like the resurrection challenge of St. Paul : "O death ! 
where is thy sting ? O grave ! where is thy victory ? " 

In a sermon preached May 26, 186 1, when but the first mut- 
terings of the storm had been heard and the first splashes of rain 
were felt, he says : " He whose remains are to pass to-day, amid 
many tears, through yonder city, lived long though he died early. 
Why ? Because he lived to a moral purpose. Because he has 
given his name to patriotism. Millions of men shall live four- 
score years and shall not leave any such memorial as he has left. 



316 BIOGRAPHY OF 

He had lived long enough. Any man that can give the whole 
weight of his being and his heart-life to a great truth or cause has 
lived long enough. Measure him by the higher and not by the 
lower standard. Do not say that he has lost days, that he has 
lost coming honors, that he lost pleasure. He lost nothing. He 
gained everything. He gained glory, and paid his life for it in 
such a way as to take on immortality." 

One very intimate with him in those days says : " I do not 
think that he spent a moment in solicitude for the fate of those 
who were at the front, not even of his own flesh and blood. Ev- 
erything seemed swallowed up in his zeal for his country, and for 
her he was ready to sacrifice everything without complaint or 
hesitation." 

" My oldest son is in the army, and shall I read with trembling 
anxiety the account of every battle to see if he is slain ? I gave 
him to the Lord, and I shall not take him back and I will not 
worry and fret myself about him. I will trust in God though 
He slay not only him but me also ; and all I have I put on the 
same ground — I try to, sometimes not succeeding and sometimes 
succeeding a little. My God, this Christ Emmanuel — God with 
me — has sustained and comforted me in care and trouble, and 
taken away my fear and put hope in its place, and I will look to 
Him still ; and if there are any here that have carried burdens, 
and whose faces are wrinkled with care, I beseech of you to try 
living by faith in a present Saviour that loves you and ordains all 
things, and says that everything shall work for your good if you 
love God." 

Among the things that occupied his time and called forth 
all his energies was the equipment of the Fourteenth Long Isl- 
and Regiment. His home at 124 Columbia Heights became a 
store-house of military goods and a place of consultation for 
men interested in the events that were taking place ; Plymouth 
Church became a rendezvous for regiments passing to the front, 
and the church parlors a workshop where the women and maid- 
ens of the church,, under the direction of Mrs. Beecher, met daily 
to sew and knit and pack for the soldiers. He told Mrs. Beecher 
to use all his salary in this direction, except such as was abso- 
lutely necessary for running the household. She did this, and 
added to the amount by personal solicitation from families and 
merchants, until an immense sum was raised and expended. 



REV, HENRY WARD BEECHER. 317 

While many men sent single substitutes, Mr. Beecher deter- 
mined to be represented in the war by a whole regiment ; and so, 
after helping to fit out two regiments, he took upon himself the 
entire burden of equipping a new one, called '' The Long Island 
Volunteers," afterwards the Sixty-seventh New York. This regi- 
ment would never have had any existence but for the labors of 
Mr. and Mrs. Beecher, and the members of the church whom 
they interested in it. Their eldest son, Henry Barton Beecher, 
joined it and was made a lieutenant. In those days the gov- 
ernment had plenty of men and very little money, and therefore 
declined to accept this regiment for many weeks after it was 
organized, during which time the entire expense of feeding and 
clothing the men was borne by subscriptions raised by Mr. 
Beecher. It was not until after the battle of Bull Run, at the 
end of July, 1861, that the regiment was even in form accepted, 
and not until much later that it was actually mustered into the 
national service. 

In those days of multiplied and harassing labors Mr. Beecher 
did not lose his hope, his cheerfulness, nor even his mirthfulness. 
He had a refuge to which he constantly fled when the pressure 
became too heavy. He had also the power of seeing the humor- 
ous side of many common or even tragic events, and drawing 
from them laughter as well as tears. The flowers, too, and the 
clouds had their message for him. He kept the channels of his 
soul wide open on every side to receive, and became a fountain 
of perpetual inspiration to others. 

At this time, while the route through Baltimore was closed 
against our troops on their way to Washington, he preached to 
the " Brooklyn Fourteenth," on the eve of their departure to 
the front, upon "Our National Flag." After giving the history 
of our banner he more particularly addressed the soldiers before 
him : 

" And now God speaks by the voice of His providence, say- 
ing, ' Lift again that banner ! Advance it full and high ! ' To 
your hands God and your country commit that imperishable 
trust. You go forth self-called, or rather called by the trust of 
your countrymen and by the Spirit of your God, to take that 
trailing banner out of the dust and out of the mire, and lift it 
again where God's rains can cleanse it, and where God's free air 
can cause it to unfold and stream as it has always floated before 



3 1 8 BIOGRAPHY OF 

the wind. God bless the men that go forth to save from disgrace 
the American flag ! 

" Accept it, then, in all its fulness of meaning. It is not a 
painted rag. It is a whole national history. It is the Constitution. 
It is the government. It is the free people that stand in the 
government on the Constitution. Forget not what it means ; 
and, for the sake of its ideas rather than its mere emblazonry, 
be true to your country's flag. By your hands lift it ; but let 
your lifting it be no holiday display. It must be advanced ■ be- 
cause of the truth' 

" That flag must go to the capital of this nation ; and it must 
not go hidden, not secreted, not in a case or covering, but full 
high displayed, bright as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as 
an army with banners ! For a single week that disgraceful work, 
that shameful circuit, may be needful ; but the way from New 
England, the way from New York, the way from New Jersey and 
Pennsylvania, to Washington, lies right through Baltimore, and 
that is the way the flag must and shall go ! [Enthusiastic cheers.] 
But that flag, borne by ten thousand and thrice ten thousand 
hands, from Connecticut, from Massachusetts (God bless the 
State and all her men !), from shipbuilding Maine, from old 
granite New Hampshire, from Vermont of Bennington and 
Green-Mountain-Boy patriotism, from Rhode Island, not behind 
any in zeal and patriotism, from New York, from Ohio, from 
Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Delaware, and the other loyal 
States — that flag must be carried, bearing every one of its insig- 
nia, to the sound of the drum and the fife, into our national 
capital, until Washington shall seem to be a forest in which every 
tree supports the American banner ! 

" And it must not stop there. The country does not belong 
to us from the Lakes only to Washington, but from the Lakes to 
the Gulf of Mexico. The flag must go on. The land of Wash- 
ington shall see Washington's flag again. The land that sits in 
darkness, and in which the people see no light, shall yet see light 
dawn and liberty flash from the old American banner ! It must 
see Charleston again, and float again over every fort in Charles- 
ton harbor. It must go further, to the Alligator State, and stand 
there again. And sweeping up through all plantations and over 
all fields of sugar and rice and tobacco, and every other thing, it 
must be found in every State till you touch the Mississippi ; and, 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECHER. 3 I 9 

bathing in its waters, it must go across and fill Texas with its 
sacred light. Nor must it stop when it floats over every one of 
the States. That flag must stand, bearing its whole historic spirit 
and original meaning, in every Territory of this nation ! " 

Other sermons of similar character followed. " The Camp, 
its Dangers and Duties," was one : 

" For any one that is going forth to meet the temptations of 
camp life I had almost said I would sum up in one single word 
of remembrance a talisman of safety — temperance, absolute 
temperance. . . . The men that are dangerous in camps are not 
bloated drunkards, shameless gamblers, and such as they. But 
an accomplished officer, a brilliant fellow, who knows the world, 
who is gentle in language, who understands all the etiquettes of 
society, who is fearless of God, who believes nothing in religion, 
who does not hesitate, with wit and humor, to jeer at sacred 
things, who takes an infernal pleasure in winding around his fin- 
ger the young about him, who is polished and wicked, and walks 
as an angel of light to tempt his fellow-men, as Satan did to 
tempt our first parents — if there be in camp such a one, he is 
the dangerous man. 

" There ought to be a bold stand taken in favor of virtue by 
the good in each one of the various companies. If there is not 
such a stand taken in Company C of the Fourteenth Regiment, 
I shall be ashamed of my preaching." 

He was constantly invited to lecture, and almost any sum was 
offered to secure his services. These, as we may well conceive, 
were mostly patriotic addresses upon the great subjects that were 
then burning in the minds of the American people. 

We remember well his having a course at Providence, Rhode 
Island, the third of which was delivered Monday, after the heavy 
work of the day previous, and when he took the train he had 
not touched pen to paper nor given it a moment's thought ; but 
his mind and heart were fully awake, and the resources of a life- 
time of thought and labor were at his command. 

The battle of Bull Run, which was fought in July, as is well 
known, was the first battle of the war of really national impor- 
tance. The result was sobering and humiliating to the North. 
On the following Sunday evening Mr. Beecher preached a ser- 
mon upon " God in National Affairs." After tracing His way in 
the history of the nation, he says : 



320 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" The battle is well begun. If I consult my pride, if I con- 
sult my vanity, I fain would never have seen our banners dip ; 
and yet, if I consult a larger wisdom, I know not but that the 
best thing that can befall us is that humiliation which shall 
teach us not to rely so much on words and cheers and newspa- 
per campaigns. A defeat just sufficient to make us feel that we 
must fall upon the interior stores of manhood, that we must have 
faith in God, that we must set aside everything but a solemn 
purpose and an earnest consecration of ourselves to this work 
which God has given us to do — such a defeat cannot but be 
beneficial." 

And so it proved. The battle of Bull Run awoke the North 
from its dream of easy conquest, and thenceforth she took up the 
war in earnest. 

In his Thanksgiving sermon in November of that year, upon 
" Modes and Duties of Emancipation," he shows the conserva- 
tism of his belief and his confidence in the national authority 
if rightly used — " This conflict must be carried on through our 
institutions, not over them " — and his view of the great forces en- 
gaged — " While preparations for this conflict have been going on 
God has poured money into our coffers and taken it away from 
those who might use it to our harm. He is holding back France 
and England, and saying to all nations/ 'Appoint the bounds! 
Let none enter the lists to interfere while those gigantic warriors 
battle for victory ! Liberty and God, and slavery and the devil, 
stand over against each other, and let no man put hand or foot into 
the ring till they have done battle unto death ! ' Amen ! Even so, 
Lord Almighty. It is Thy decree, and it shall stand ! And 
when the victory shall come, not unto us, not unto us, but — in 
the voice of thrice ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, 
of ransomed ones, mingled with Thine earthly children's gladness 
— unto Thee shall be the praise and the glory, for ever and 
ever. Amen." 

During all these years, almost from the time he came to 
Brooklyn, Mr. Beecher had been fortunate in having a channel 
of communication with the public, in general so in harmony 
with his own views and spirit as the New York Independent. In 
its second number appears an extract from a sermon of his, fol- 
lowed by frequent contributions from his pen called " Star Pa- 
pers," and for the last three years a sermon in full upon the sec- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 32 1 

ond page. He is now called to its head. In the issue of Decem- 
ber 19, 1861, appears his " Salutatory." Since in this he gives, in 
brief, his conception of the office and importance of the religious 
newspaper, it is given in full : 

" The undersigned has to-day assumed the editorial manage- 
ment of the Independent. This will not involve any change in 
the principles, the purposes, or general spirit of the paper. The 
Independent was founded to illustrate and to defend the truths 
and doctrines of the Christian religion ; to employ them as the 
authoritative standards by which to estimate and influence events, 
measures, and men ; to infuse a spirit of truth and humanity into 
the affairs of this nation ; to give aid and encouragement to 
every judicious scheme of Christian benevolence. It has sought 
to leaven with the Christian spirit all the great elements of 
our civilization. These were the aims. The results are upon 
record. 

" For the future, studying a catholic sympathy with all who 
love our Lord Jesus Christ, and seeking to promote concord 
among all Christians of every name, the Independent will still 
continue explicitly and firmly to hold and to teach those great 
cardinal doctrines of religion that are substantially held in com- 
mon by the Congregational orthodox churches of New England 
and by the Presbyterian churches of our whole land. But, as 
heretofore, this will be done for the promotion of vital godliness 
rather than for sectarianism. 

M The Independent will not deviate from that application of 
Christian truth to all public questions which has thus far charac- 
terized its course. While seeking to promote religious feeling, as 
such, and to incite and supply devotional wants, it will not for- 
get that there is an ethical as well as an emotive life in true reli- 
gion. We shall therefore assume the liberty of meddling with 
every question which agitates the civil or Christian community, 
according to our own best discretion. 

" The editorial profession, with the progress of popular intel- 
ligence, has assumed an importance second to no other. It may 
unite in it the elements of power hitherto distributed in the sev- 
eral professions, and add, besides, many that have belonged to no 
other calling. He who knows the scope and power of the press 
need desire no higher office than the editorial. 

" In that silent realm of influences out of which proceed the 



3 2 2 B10GRAPH Y OF 

actions of men and the events of history, the editor is the invis- 
ible leader. Votes cannot raise him higher. His pen is more 
than a sceptre. Profoundly impressed with such a responsibility, 
desiring to honor God in the welfare of men, we ask the sympa- 
thy of good men and the remembrance of all who pray. 

"Henry Ward Beecher." 

At this time the excitement growing out of the capture of 
Mason and Slidell on board the British steamer Trent, by Com- 
modore Wilkes on the San Jacinto, was at its height. News had 
just reached this country of the bitter feeling awakened by " the 
outrage," of the shipment of troops to Canada, and other hasty 
preparations by Great Britain to avenge the insult to her flag. 
And Mr. Beecher's first editorial bears the somewhat ominous 
title of " War with England." 

As we might expect, it is both temperate and defiant in lan- 
guage and tone : 

" We have no idea that there will be any war with that power. 
England has a peculiar practical wisdom in affairs which touch 
her own material interests. Her folly will be expended in words; 
her wisdom reserved for actions. It is not her interest to go to 
war with the Northern States in the interest of the Southern 
States. There is no probability that she will allow herself, what- 
ever she has done in other days, to be found fighting for slavery 
against freedom. . . . 

" There is no desire on our part for so unnatural a war. 
To avert it we shall be willing to yield anything but honor. Our 
hands are sufficiently full. To have a British fleet thundering at 
our sea-doors, while the volcano was yet pouring lava through 
our Southern States, would be a little more business on hand 
than could be attended to with that thoroughness which our peo- 
ple desire in all warlike enterprises. 

"Yet should England force us into war, terrible and atrocious 
as that would be, America is determined to put her in the wrong 
before the world. If we have transgressed any law of nations ; 
if we have, indeed, violated any right of England ; if we have, 
to the width of a hair, passed beyond the line of our own proper 
duty and right, we shall, upon suitable showing, need no menace 
to make ample reparation. We shall do it for the satisfaction of 
our own sense of justice. But if we are right, if we have done 



* REV. HENRY WARD BEECH EK. 323 

right, all the threatening^ in the world will not move this people 
from their steadfastness. . . . 

" Our wish is to unite with England in a race of civilization. 
But if she will fight, we musty 

Some idea of the variety and character of the work he did 
at this time may be gained by a look at his editorials found in 
the Independent of January 16, 1862, the third week of his ad- 
ministration as editor. The first is " Our Help from Above," in 
which he directs all burdened hearts to the great sources and 
divine methods of consolation. " The nearer our thoughts come 
to the infinite and the divine the more power have we over our 
troubles. The act of consolation is, to a great degree, the act of 
inspiration." 

The raising, equipping, and feeding such vast armies as, it was 
now seen, would be required for the prosecution of the war, 
awakened in the minds of thoughtful men a question scarcely 
second in importance to any. By what plan or on what system 
shall the money required for these large and expensive enterprises 
be secured ? His second editorial upon this page takes up this 
matter under the head of "A Word from the People to Congress," 
in which he urges the fearless imposition of taxes sufficient to 
carry on the war, and justifies such a course upon the simple 
basis of honesty. The article opens with this sentence, "Taxa- 
tion and national honesty are now synonymous," and closes 
with this, " Every honest man in America ought to send to 
Washington one message in two words, Fight, Tax." 

How to treat the black men that came into our lines, or were 
liberated by the advance of our armies, was another of the press- 
ing questions at this time, and one concerning which there was 
a great difference of opinion, He treated this subject in a 
column article on this page, entitled " Men, not Slaves." The 
position which he held, and advocated with great force and clear- 
ness, is given in this sentence : " One thing is plain — one thing 
as a starting-point admits of no doubt, needs no hesitation : let 
us forget that these blacks ever were slaves, and remember only 
that they are men. With this as our first principle we cannot go 
far wrong." 

This money-raising was a matter of so great importance that 
he devoted another column to it on this same page, on the 
" Duty of the Hour." In the first article he sent a message to 



324 BIOGRAPHY OF 

Congress ; in this he speaks to the Christian public : " Whether 
the great impending patriotic tax shall be a moral triumph and a 
testimony to the religious life of this people will depend largely 
upon the conduct of Christian men and the action of Christian 
teachers. . . . There seems to have been very little education of the 
consciences of Christian men to the duty of a cheerful support of gov- 
ernment by their property. Even Christian men are tempted to give 
grudgingly, selfishly, meanly. The nobler sentiments of the heart 
have been allowed but little scope in this part of citizen duty. 

" Is the Gospel worn out ? Are ministers of the Gospel less 
manly and Christian than in the days of the fathers ? Has the 
American pulpit forgotten that its place is in the van — that it 
leads, not follows, the camp ? 

" Every church should have a public sentiment developed 
within it which shall make this national tax almost a free-will 
offering. Let Christian laymen take counsel together. Let the 
leading men of towns and neighborhoods not only set a good ex- 
ample, but make it their duty to cheer and inspirit the slow and 
reluctant. Let Christian men everywhere, and in all things, seek 
to inspire the public mind with an earnest willingness to dis- 
charge this great debt which we are called to pay for national 
unity, national safety, and national glory" 

In those days of dress-parades in our largest army, and " all 
quiet on the Potomac," men chafed continually over what ap- 
peared to be inaction and timidity on the part of the government 
at Washington. This found expression in still another article by 
this same pen upon this same page, " Courage and Enterprise " : 

" There was never a time when timidity was so nearly allied 
to rashness, and courage to the highest prudence, as now. We 
have every element of national prosperity except the courage to 
use our power. Standing on a centre and whirling around with 
sound and celerity may make a top, but never an administration. 
Courage to see and accept the whole national danger ; courage 
to see and to accept the thoroughest remedy ; courage to ask 
the people for all that is needed, without a thought of refusal ; 
courage to use the means, willingly afforded, so as to put the 
whole strength of this nation into every blow ; courage to dash 
in pieces every enemy, without stopping to consider just how we 
shall mend the pieces afterward — this is the very critical pru- 
dence of good administration. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 325 

" Since war is upon us, let us have courage to make war. 

" There is no money needed, there are no men wanted, there 
is no enthusiasm that the North will not give with eager glad- 
ness, if only somebody will speak to the nation such words as the 
fathers spoke ! Then men loved liberty ! The nation suffered 
for a principle ! What are we doing now ? Are we raising moss 
on cannon-wheels, or are we fighting ? Is it husbandry or war 
that is going on ? Are we to starve Southern armies or conquer 
them ? Do we mean to put down rebellion by soldiers or 
ferrets ? " 

These editorials showed certain features which were as char- 
acteristic of his work in the editor's chair as they were in the 
pulpit and upon the platform ; the first of these was this : he chose 
his subjects from among the things which at that time affected 
and interested the people. This he did, not simply because he 
could then get the ear of the public, nor because these were in 
themselves the largest or most important matters, but from a 
deep religious conviction that these present questions and present 
interests were a part of God's providence, by which and through 
which He was accomplishing His purposes ; and that in treating 
these matters he was working together with Him. He believed 
thoroughly in God's action in common affairs and through the 
impulses given to common men. This conviction made him a 
leader of the people without bringing him into bondage to them. 
It gave him the kind of leadership to which he attained : not of 
the abstract thinker in the movements of a hundred years hence, 
but of the practical man of affairs in the battles of to-day. This 
gave him the boldness that he never failed to display. Confi- 
dent that he was moving in harmony with God's purpose and at 
His own appointed time, he waited for no gathering of numbers, 
but pushed on alone, if necessary, with an assurance born of 
faith. Storms and confusion did not daunt him, because he 
recognized in these but the necessary methods by which the Al- 
mighty carries out His designs in the moral and spiritual as in the 
material world. 

Another characteristic feature was seen in his treatment of 
the subject in hand. He uniformly regarded it from the stand- 
point of the law of Christ's kingdom on the earth — " Bear ye 
one another's burdens." This insured harmony in his policy 
through all changes of events around him, and ultimately secured 



I 



326 BIOGRAPHY OP 

success. All the forces of the universe, because created and 
administered by the Saviour of mankind, were on the side not 
only of justice and truth but of kindness, forbearance, and help- 
fulness, and must in time prevail. So deep was his conviction of 
the direct and universal application of the law of this kingdom 
that he instinctively took this side, and linked his action and his 
destiny with its fortunes, when prudence and policy would seem 
to dictate a different course, with a sublime confidence in its 
final victory. 

A third characteristic was this : He wrote so as to awaken in- 
spiration, to stir men's hearts to feel. It was not enough that 
men believed a truth ; that was nothing unless they felt it. His 
words must take hold, they must excite the emotions and move 
men to action, or they were a failure. 

Besides the editorial articles referred to on this one page, 
there was his sermon in this same issue occupying more than four 
columns of the second page of the paper. It was upon the Divine 
Government, and moved along on these lofty heights : " We be- 
lieve that God is in His own world and that He governs it by His 
personal will ; that this government includes nations, families, and 
individuals ; that it aims at the highest good and the everlasting 
good of sentient and intelligent creatures ; that it is one which 
admits the action of our minds upon God's and the action of 
God's upon ours ; that it has in it a place for all human yearn- 
ings and strivings and longings." " I bring you a Gospel that 
will never wear out, a Gospel which is for ever fresh, and that 
is, Emmanuel— God with us : God with you, in you, around you, 
loving you, bearing with you, forgiving you, helping you, watch- 
ing over you, taking you up and carrying you as the parent takes 
up and carries the little child." 

The first anniversary Sunday of the attack on Fort Sum- 
ter was marked by a sermon on the " Success of American De- 
mocracy," the tone of which may be judged by the following 
passage : 

" ' We will give every dollar that we are worth, every child 
that we have, and our own selves ; we will bring all that we are 
and all that we have, and offer them up freely — but this country 
shall be one and undivided. We will have one Constitution 
and one liberty, and that universal.' The Atlantic shall sound it 
and the Pacific shall echo it back, deep answering to deep, 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. $2J 

and it shall reverberate from the Lakes on the North to the un- 
frozen Gulf on the South — ' One nation, one Constitution, one 
starry banner ! ' Hear it, England ! — one country, and indivisi- 
ble. Hear it, Europe ! — one people, and inseparable. One 
God ; one hope ; one baptism ; one Constitution ; one govern- 
ment ; one nation ; one country ; one people — cost what it may, 
we will have it ! " 

The summer of 1862 was, perhaps, a period of as great dis- 
couragement to the North as any during the war. After months 
of preparation and wearisome delays, with the grandest army 
that had ever been gathered on this continent, McClellan had 
made his advance against Richmond, only to entrench, retreat, and 
at last to be hurled back defeated and shattered. It was when 
these terrible disasters were beginning to be understood and 
their true significance appreciated that Mr. Beecher's editorials 
in the Independent rose to their highest point of power and influ- 
ence. They were directed to the people and to the government 
as occasion demanded, but always with such a grouping of facts, 
with so clear an appreciation of the situation, and with so great 
earnestness of appeal and power of denunciation that they must 
be reckoned among the loyal forces. We give the titles and a few 
sentences from several of that time, that their general character 
may be understood. On July 3, 1862, we have one upon "The 
Great Duty " : 

"In another column will be found the President's call for 
300,000 more soldiers. These, and as many more if needed, can 
be raised. The North has not changed her mind. The integrity 
of this nation, the authority of its Constitution over all its origi- 
nal territory, will be maintained at every hazard and at whatever 
expense. 

" It is our duty to the nation and to the family of nations to 
make a slaveholders' rebellion so odious and disastrous that it 
shall stand to all ages like Sodom and Gomorrah. Whatever it 
may cost in men and money, the North is fully assured that for 
nothing else can money be so well spent, and for nothing nobler 
can men live, or, if need be, lay down their lives ! 

" The great duty now is to maintain a united North. No 
event can be more sure than the victory of this government over 
the slaveholders' conspiracy, if the loyal States are united. But 
if secret feuds or open factions shall divide and paralyze the 



328 BIOGRAPHY OF 

popular feeling, the cause will fail, or succeed only after long, 
wasting, and useless expenditures." 

In the next issue, July 10, he has an equally strong editorial 
upon " The Country's Need." The suppression of news, the 
failure to trust the people, the political intrigues at the capital, 
moved him to righteous and sorrowful indignation : 

" Did the government frankly say to this nation, We are de- 
feated ? To this hour it has not trusted the people. It held 
back the news for days. Nor was the truth honestly told when 
outside information compelled it to say something. It is even to 
this hour permitting McClellan's disaster to be represented as a 
piece of skilfully planned strategy! After the labor of two months, 
the horrible sickness of thousands of men poisoned in the swamps 
of the Chickahominy, the loss of probably more than ten thousand 
as noble fellows as ever lifted a hand to defend their country, 
McClellan, who was four miles from Richmond, finds himself 
twenty-five miles from the city, wagons burned, ammunition-trains 
blown up, parks of artillery captured, no entrenchments, and 
with an army so small that it is not pretended that he can reach 
Richmond ! The public are infatuated. The papers that re- 
galed us two weeks ago with visions of a Fourth of July in Rich- 
mond are now asking us to rejoice and acclaim — not at victory — 
but that we have just saved the army ! McClellan is safe ! — and 
Richmond too ! 

" The government, upon this disaster, procures the governors 
of the States to ask it to call for 300,000 more men. Why did 
not the President take the responsibility, plainly confess our 
disaster, say that we were within a hand-breadth of ruin, throw 
himself on the people ? No. The people pay taxes, give their 
sons and brothers — but that is all. We are sick and weary of this 
conduct. We have a sacred cause, a noble army, good officers, 
and a heroic common people. But we are like to be ruined by 
an administration that will not tell the truth ; that spends pre- 
cious time in playing at President-making ; that is cutting and 
shuffling the cards for the next great political campaign. Unless 
good men awake, unless the accursed silence is broken that has 
fallen on the people, unless the government is held sternly to its 
responsibility to the people, we shall dally through the summer, 
make brigadier-generals until autumn, build huge entrenchments, 
but fight no battles till they are forced upon us, and then we 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 329 

shall be called upon to celebrate our defeats or retreats as mas- 
terly strategies ! 

" We have a country. We have a cause. We have a people. 
Let all good men pray that God would give us a government ! " 

This is followed by one, July 17, on the "Patriotism of the 
People." Its tone will be understood by these few sentences : 

" There is no need of rousing the patriotism of the people. 
It is an inexhaustible quality. It underlies their very life. The 
government itself is buoyed up by it, and rides upon it, like a 
ship upon the fathomless ocean. 

" No. It is the government that needs rousing. We do not 
need meetings on the Hudson, but motion on the Potomac. It 
is not in Boston, or Buffalo, or Cincinnati, or New York that 
this case is to be settled, but in Washington. There is no use of 
concealing it. The people are beginning to distrust their rulers 
— not their good nature, their patriotism, their honesty, but their 
capacity for the exigency of military affairs. They know that in 
war an hour often carries a campaign in its hand. A day is a 
year. The President seems to be a man without any sense of 
the value of time. The people admire his disinterestedness. 
They believe him firm when he reaches decisions. But they 
perceive how long a period he requires to form judgments ; how 
wide a circuit he takes of uncertainty and vacillation before he 
determines. In civil affairs, that can bear to wait, the people 
deem him among the best of our long line of Presidents. But 
it is war ! Armies are perishing. Months are wasting. We 
are in the second year of rebellion. We have been just on the 
eve of doing something for sixteen months ! 

" The nation rose up in its majesty to punish rebellion. It 
put a magnificent army into the President's hand. For one year 
that army was besieged in the capital ! 

" At length, this past spring, began the campaign in Virginia. 
The people gloried in the belief that the majesty of the gov- 
ernment would be asserted. After four months' campaign the 
armies of the United States are on the defensive! Not less than 
a hundred thousand men have been lost by death, wounds, sick- 
ness, and captivity ; McClellan is cooped up on James River ; 
Pope is collecting an army ; and the country is to-day actually 
debating whether the enemy cannot strike a blow at Washington ! 
Is this such a management as will confirm the confidence of the 



330 BIOGRAPHY OF 

country in Mr. Lincoln's conduct of the war ? Do we need to 
ask why men are slow to volunteer ? Does any man need to 
be told what the end of such things must be ? This is not pun- 
ishing rebellion ; it is helping it. . . . 

" We speak plainly, sorrowfully, earnestly. An enemy of the 
Administration would have no right to speak so. We are friends 
— all the more because we speak out what millions think but do 
not utter, lest it might hinder the cause. But, unless some one 
speaks, there will soon be little cause left to hinder or to help." 

In the next issue, that of July 24, he has another two-column 
editorial upon " The Duty of To-day " : 

"In the beginning of this great struggle the question among 
loyal men was, How shall we save this nation ? One year of 
fighting and the question is, Whether we can save it ? That is 
the question of to-day. . . . 

" The South has simplicity and unity o£ purpose. The North 
is uncertain which she wishes most — to subdue the rebellion, to 
leave slavery unharmed, or to have the right President at the 
next election ! 

" The South adjourns every question and postpones every in- 
terest in favor of arms. The North is busy with conflicting 
schemes and interests — and is also mildly carrying on war. 

" Does anybody doubt the result of such a course ? It is so 
certain that it is not worth our while to waste another man or an- 
other dollar ! Either the Administration policy should instantly 
change or the war cease ! It is not more vigor so much as a dif- 
ferent internal idea. If the Administration cannot be disenchant- 
ed of the traditional policy that has grown up during the heart- 
less, timid, compromising era of the last half-century, and adopt 
the simple and straightforward policy that becomes a people 
striving for liberty and free institutions upon the American con- 
tinent, then we are doomed ! It is war that we are making — war 
first, war second, war wholly ! It is not politics. It is not Con- 
stitution-making. It is not the decision of legal niceties. These 
are not the business of government, as toward the South. It is 
war, absolute, terrible, and immeasurable war ! 

"The South has organized on the fact of slavery, and fights 
on that issue, pure and simple. The North must organize on the 
doctrine of liberty, and fight right through on that issue, pure and 
simple. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 33 1 

14 The South sacrifices everything that conflicts with her cen- 
tral idea. The North must do the same. The South is not 
ashamed of slavery. The North must not be ashamed of liberty! 

"... The government cannot any longer avoid choosing the 
issue that has been made up and thrust upon it — -freedom or slav- 
ery. The time has come. So long as there was a chance of 
solving this question as a civil question it was wise to leave it, as 
far as possible, to the States concerned, and to employ the moral 
influences which change men's minds. But slavery has become a 
military question. One year has changed all things. A remiss 
and vacillating policy of the Administration ; the committing of 
the armies of the United States for a whole year to a man who 
thought he was at West Point giving a four years' course of in- 
struction to five hundred thousand men infinitely at leisure, has 
changed the relations and possibilities of things. It has taken 
slavery out of the realm of discussion and placed it in the arena 
of war. It must be settled by force. . . . 

" Nothing will unite this people like a bold annunciation of a 
moral principle. Let the American flag be lifted up by Mr. Lin- 
coln, as was the brazen serpent, and let it be known that every 
man who looks upon it on this continent shall be free, and a 
tide of joy and irresistible enthusiasm will sweep away every 
obstacle. Let Mr. Lincoln decree it. The nation will do it ! 

" Such a policy would carry the conscience of the North ; 
would kindle the enthusiasm for liberty, which is always the most 
potent of influences ; would bring all the historic traditions of 
the old American struggle to enkindle the ardor of the young, 
who are to form our armies. It would brush away at one stroke 
a thousand hindrances, give simplicity and unity to our plans, and 
distinctness to our policy. It would end all threat of foreign in- 
tervention. Above all, it would give to the American armies 
that pillar of smoke by day and fire by night by which God the 
Emancipator led forth His people from bondage into liberty ! " 

In the next issue, July 31, he writes a two-column editorial 
upon " The Root of the Matter " : 

" It is not enough that we increase our men and means. We 
shall never succeed until we accept the idea latent in this con- 
flict. Slavery must be crushed. Liberty must have absolute and 
unquestioned dominion on this continent. We will not have op- 
pression under the symbol of a sceptre or of a whip — neither ex- 



332 BIOGRAPHY OF 

ported from abroad nor sprouting from our own soil ! This 
continent is dedicated to Liberty. It is the mission of this gene- 
ration of men to establish free institutions from ocean to ocean. 
We sought to do it in peace. Since war has come, we will seek 
to take from its repulsiveness and horror by making it serve the 
noblest ends of human liberty. If it is for liberty upon a whole 
continent that we fight, then every son or brother that falls is 
a sacrificial victim. By his blood we ransom generations of 
men ! 

" The way to make the Administration see this truth is to see 
it ourselves. There is a kind of political mesmerism. Our 
rulers will partake of our sensations. What the people see the 
President will see. What the people taste will repeat itself on 
the President's tongue. 

" Let the sentence be spoken. Let all hindrances and hesita- 
tions end. Lift up the banner ! And as the winds of war roll 
out its folds, let those letters shine out as if God had written 
them with heavenly light, ' Universal Emancipation.' " 

The next editorial, August 7, is upon " A Leader for the 
People." These were the days of Pope and the disasters of the 
army, and the uncertainty and terror at Washington. Two col- 
umns of argument and appeal for more genuine enthusiasm for 
the great doctrines on which this government was founded 
close with a prayer, the only relief of a heart bursting with a 
mighty passion of sorrow and impatience : 

" Great God, what a people hast Thou brought forth upon 
this continent ! What love of liberty ; what heroic love of law 
and institution ; what courage, and constancy, and self-sacrifice 
hast Thou given them ! And no man is found to lead this so 
great a nation ! Be Thou Leader ! Lord God of Hosts, hast 
Thou forgotten how to lead a people ? There are no ages on 
Thy head ! Years make Thee neither old nor weary ! Behind 
Thy unwrinkled brow no care dwells ! Teach this people to 
need no other leader but Thyself ! Then, led by Thee, teach 
them to be all-sufficient for every deed of justice, and omnipo- 
tent for liberty ! " 

These are followed, August 14, by a three-column editorial 
upon " The Time has Come " : 

" We have been made irresolute, indecisive, and weak by the 
President's attempt to unite impossibilities ; to make war and 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 333 

keep the peace ; to strike hard and not hurt ; to invade sover- 
eign States and not meddle with their sovereignty ; to put down 
rebellion without touching its cause ; to bring an infuriated 
people into enforced union with their enemies, and to leave all 
their causes of quarrels unsettled and vigorous, and yet hope for 
future concord. 

" Thus far the conservative North has been striving to con- 
duct this war so as not to meddle with the so-called Southern 
right of slavery. But, in spite of every scruple, events have 
crowded men to the necessity of confiscation and emancipation. 
There is one more step. It is the last sublime step toward na- 
tional safety and national Christian glory. It is immediate and 
universal emancipation ! " 

In the next issue, August 21, is another article, upon "The 
Only Ground," of the same temper, urging the same plea : 

" The President has the right and power to destroy slavery. 
Let him account to the civilized world for not doing it." 

And another August 28, upon "Reconstruction " : 

" Since, then, the old Union is de facto ceased, and all the 
local rights lapsed by rebellion to the hands of the government, 
and it is to reconstruct the Union, would it be a stretch of author- 
ity in the government so to reconstruct it as to insure its perpetu- 
ity by purging out all possible cause of future discord? The 
President has the authority. He is exercising it every day. All 
that we ask is that he will look forward and not backward j that 
he will consider the nation of the future, and not mere precedents 
in the past. . . . To put down rebellion first, and attend to slavery 
afterwards, is letting two serpents uncoil that may as well be 
stricken through with one blow." 

The preacher's pulpit is in perfect accord with the editor's 
chair. In a sermon of July 27, 1862, he says : "God has been 
pleased to bring this nation at this time into great trials that are to 
test the faith of all true men. I think that we have not by a long 
way touched bottom yet. I think that the wind has not yet blown 
its fiercest. There are blacker clouds than those that have yet 
expended their fury. I cast no confidence away. I do not know 
that we are to succeed to-day or to-morrow ; but we are going to 
succeed. I do not know that we are going to succeed in Virginia 
for the present, but we are a-going to succeed in America.' 

" When I die there will be a great many things that, if I have 



334 BIOGRAPHY OF 

time to think of them, I may be sorry for. After I die there 
may be a great many inconsistencies, a great many sins, a great 
many unperformed duties that, when I behold them in retro- 
spect, I shall regret. But I tell you that, whether in the passage 
of death, or at the gate of heaven, or before God's eternal throne, 
I never expect to be sorry that I have preached so often and so 
strongly in behalf of those that were in bonds ; that I have spoken, 
as I have had opportunity, for those that could not speak for 
themselves ; that I have roused up, according to the measure of 
my influence, the whole community to vindicate the cause of God 
toward His oppressed ones. I shall not be sorry for that. I 
shall be sorry that I have not done more ; but I never shall be 
sorry that I have done so much. 

" And my faith in this cause was never so strong as it is now. 
J do not throw it away. I feel certain that if the will of God is 
done in this matter, though we may have to wait, we shall have 
great recompense of reward in waiting. 

" May God inspire the hearts of our rulers by the right things! 
May God unite the hearts of this great people in right counsels 
and in right feelings ! May God accept the offerings that we 
make of our children, of our brothers, of our neighbors, of every- 
thing that we have ! Let us put them all on the altar of patriot- 
ism, knowing that in this case the altar of patriotism is the altar 
of God. He will accept the offering, and in His own time, by 
tokens infallible, He will reward our faith and bring us forth 
purged, purified, strengthened by the things which we have suf- 
fered." 

With all his earnestness he must have his laugh at a contem- 
porary, " A Queer Pulpit " : 

" We knew that the Journal of Commerce was famous upon 
statistics and prided itself upon its good literary taste. But we 
had no idea before of the powers of its rhetoric. We extract a 
figure from its issue of August 27 that should be commended to 
the directors of the New York Hospital : 

" ' It is the voice -of a glorious past which speaks to him, in 
the tones of the fathers whose graves are with us. It is the voice 
of the living nation, millions on millions of whom utter the same 
words we utter to-day. It is the voice of posterity, speaking from 
the womb of time, that calls on him to save the Constitution, which 
was made, not for the duration of a human life, but to be the 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 335 

blessing of all men and all nations until the end of thrones and 
earthly powers. That he will be faithful we do not for one in- 
stant doubt.' 

" This is taking part in politics rather early. Constitutional 
studies must be pursued under difficulties in this case. But if 
posterity are so greatly stirred in their minds, there is nothing 
for it but for the President to write them a letter. He answered 
Horace Greeley. Surely he will heed the sufferings of posterity 
in such uncomfortable quarters. 

" For ourselves, we cannot be too thankful that we are al- 
ready born. We prefer open-air speaking. If the President 
don't save the Constitution now, it is a hopeless case ! " 

In an editorial, September n, upon " The Contrast," he sums 
up the difference in sentences like these : 

" Richmond determines, Washington reasons ; Richmond is 
inflexible, Washington vacillates ; Richmond knows what it 
wants to do, Washington wishes that it knew ; Richmond loves 
slavery and hates liberty, Washington is somewhat partial to lib- 
erty and rather dislikes slavery ; Rebellion is wise and sinful, 
Government is foolish." 

Upon a report that a member of the Cabinet had said 
" that nations often lose their institutions, their liberties, and yet 
preserve their national life, and that in our case we must aim to 
preserve the national life," he writes an editorial (September 18, 
1862) which he properly entitled "The Trumpet": 

"... Let other people imagine as they may a national life, 
like a disembodied spirit, wandering over the continent seeking 
rest and finding none. We propose no such issue to this strug- 
gle. The nation must emerge from war shorn of no attribute 
and mutilated in none of its members. We claim this continent 
for liberty. We demand the execution of slavery for treason. 
We arraign this arch-conspirator, arrested with a dagger in its 
hand aimed at the life of this government and the liberties of the 
people, and in the name of mankind and before Almighty God 
we demand that its life be forfeited. Let the trumpet sound ! " 

These are but samples of the editorials that were sent out 
from his pen through the columns of the Independent. Week 
after week they continued, pleading for vigor, denouncing inac- 
tion, urging that liberty be recognized as the great issue at stake, 
and demanding, immediate emancipation of the slave. 



336 BIOGRAPHY OF 

At last, after this long, weary, heart-breaking delay, he pub- 
lishes, September 25, " The Proclamation" of the President an- 
nouncing " that on the first day of January, in the year of our 
Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons 
held as slaves within any State, or any designated part of a State, 
the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United 
States, shall be thenceforward and for ever free." Mr. Beecher 
says of it : 

" We send forth to-day the most important paper ever pub- 
lished in the I?idependent, the most extraordinary document ever 
proceeding from this government. . . . 

" No more guises and veils. No more side-issues. No more 
deceitful compromises. The government has taken ground, and 
every man in the nation must take ground. You are for or 
against this government, and this government is declared to 
mean liberty to the slave ! There is no neutral ground for trai- 
tors to hide in, playing wolf at night and sheep by day. The 
President's proclamation will sift the North, give unity to its 
people, simplicity to its policy, liberty to its army ! That whole, 
army is no longer a mongrel something between a police force 
and a political caucus. It is an army organized to strike where 
blows will be most felt. 

" The Proclamation emancipates slaves in thrice thirty days. 
But it emancipates the government and the army to-day. The 
nation is freer than it was on the 21st. We have a policy. The 
people will base it upon a principle. It is the policy of lib- 
erty upon the principle of justice. The future is before us ! 
Through what dark days we must pass we know not. What bat- 
tles and what reverses are in store we do not inquire. At last 
we have a right to believe that God is leading us. He who car- 
ried His people from bondage through the wilderness, and estab- 
lished them in the promised land, can surely guide us ! 

" Let sorrows fall fast ; there is joy before us ! We behold 
upon the troubled sea a Christ coming to us, walking on the 
waves ! In His hand are winds and storms. Every hour now 
moves toward the great day of Emancipation. At length the 
dawn shall bring that day most eminent in our national calendar. 
Amid all the festivities that usher in the year, there shall be a 
great joy, deeper, purer, holier than ever came to us with the New 
Year — the joy of a nation that, after long sorrow and shame, shall 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 337 

cast off from itself the guilt of slavery, and stand erect before 
the world a consistent witness for liberty ! " 

He looks upon it as the beginning of the end, and is satisfied 
if it be God's will that his work should now cease. On the even- 
ing of the last day of slavery in America — Wednesday evening, 
December 31 — he says in his lecture-room talk: 

" As for myself, let come what will come, I care not. God 
may peel me, and bark me, and strip me of my leaves, and do as 
He chooses with my earthly estate. I have lived long enough ; 
I have had a good time. You cannot take back the blows I 
have given the devil right in the face. I have uttered some 
words that will not die, because they are incorporated into the 
lives of men that will not die. Through my instrumentality, 
aided by God's providence, many souls have been converted and 
gone singing home to their eternal abode. I think I have a larger 
church in heaven than I have on earth, and I think they love me 
and want me there. I have no reason to ask for longer life. If 
my work is done, and God does not want me here, and this is my 
last night of labor on earth, ought I to be sorry ? Ought I not 
to be the' most grateful man that ever lived that I have had such 
health, that I have had such an open field, that I have had the 
privilege of speaking the truth right straight along for fifteen 
years, whether men would hear or whether they would forbear, 
and that I have been borne up, in doing this, by so large 
a church, composed of such an enthusiastic body of God's 
people ? 

" And to-night the shadows of the past come over me. I re- 
member when I first stood, in about this place, in the old church. 
I remember the sermon that I preached to you on the first Sunday 
night after I came among you, as if it were but an hour ago. I 
then declared to the inchoate congregation gathered here that 
it was my purpose to preach the Gospel in its applications to 
slavery, and peace, and war, and moral purity, and every Chris- 
tian reform, and that I would do it whether you heard it or not, 
and whether you stood by me or forsook me. I recollect those 
times perfectly well. 

" Fifteen years have passed since then, and here we are talk- 
ing about the President of the United States emancipating four 
million slaves. Here we are in the midst of a war whose inevit- 
able outcome from this time must be to make war on slavery. 



338 REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Mightier than Congress now is the arm for emancipation — mightier 
than all things ! In the providence of God what wonderful revo- 
lutions and changes have taken place in fifteen years ! I am 
willing to live fifteen years more, if God wishes it, if I may renew 
my youth and work on. I should dread to find now that there 
were no more locks to get up, and that I must henceforth travel 
on a dead level. I would try and pull with my freight-boat on a 
level, if God wished me to, though I would like here and there 
to rise. It would be a pleasure to live, if it were God's will, till 
the day-star dawned, for I know it will dawn, but I am willing 
to lay down my burden at any time, if it please God. If He will 
accept the thanks that I give Him for all that He has permitted 
me to do, to say, and experience in days past, then, as to the 
future, let His will be done. I ask neither to live nor to die." 

This closes the third era of his work in the great anti-slavery 
contest. We now turn back to glance over the same period and 
note some of the more important events aside from this strug- 
gle, public, domestic, and private, that marked the years from 
1850 to January, 1863. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

First Voyage to England — Extracts from Diary— Warwick Castle— Strat- 
ford-on-Avon — The Skylark— Oxford — Bodleian Library — London — 
Old-time Sadness— Paris— Catch-Words from Diary— Effect of Pic- 
ture-Gallery — The Louvre — His Return. 

IN the middle of the year 1850 his labors were interrupted. 
" Henry Ward Beecher, our esteemed brother, sailed for 

Europe on Tuesday, July 9, in the ship New World, Captain 
Knight. It was a sudden move, but having received a friendly 
invitation from the captain, and taking the advice of his friends 
that a voyage out and back would be of essential benefit to his 
health, which has been considerably shattered by repeated attacks 
of illness, he accepted the invitation, but expects to return with 
the vessel. During his absence the pulpit of Plymouth Church 
will be supplied by the pastor's younger brother, Rev. Charles 
Beecher, of Indiana." This item we find in the Itidependent of 
that week : 

"Journal. — Landed from New World July 30, 1850. Water- 
loo Inn." 

This is the first entry in a memorandum-book now in our 
hands, and it tells its own story. He is in Liverpool, England. 

We have spoken of Mr. Beecher's perfect health, and such 
he enjoyed, for the most part, through life. But it was only re- 
tained, after he came to Brooklyn, by great care on his part. Be- 
fore he had learned the necessity of this there had been several 
failures. One was an attack of erysiphaltic fever, in the spring 
of 1849, which kept him out of his pulpit for several months. 
During the following winter he had a severe attack of quinsy, 
from the exhaustion of which it seemed to his friends that he 
was breaking down, and they procured passage for him to 
Europe, as has just been stated, and gave him a three months' 
leave of absence. 

Another experience now opened to him. The sea, out upon 
which he had so often looked with longing eyes, in boyhood, 
from the wharves of Boston, and across whose waters he had 
often sailed in imagination, he now, for the first time, traversed 

339 



34-0 BIOGRAPHY OF 

in reality. He found it far less agreeable than he expected, and 
learned on this his first voyage, what no after-experience ever 
contradicted, that for him " the only pleasant thing about going 
to sea was the going ashore." 

From his note-book and diary we can follow him, step by 
step, and from his letters to friends can learn of some of those 
experiences that made this trip memorable in its impressions 
and influence. The next entry in his journal reads : 

"July 31, Manchester and back. Hedges same as combed 
and uncombed hair. Railroad mile-posts subdivided ; grading in 
manufacturing villages. Go out from London under ground, 
come into Manchester over tops of houses. Clothes-line across 
streets. 

" August 3, Birmingham ; railroad stations. Knight says 
thirty-three ocean steamers have been put afloat in eighteen 
months ; only the Bremen steamers before afloat. 

"Plated Ware. — Pattern dies, stamping, handles, etc.; spoons, 
forks, plain piece, cut shape, then slit tines, stamp shape ; filing- 
room, polishing, chasing or fretting, plating, brushing. Designer 
gets £2 to £2 10/per week." 

This is the first page of his note-book, and is given entire, not 
because there is anything remarkable about it, but because it is 
a sample of his note-books in general. They are full of facts, 
and facts of every description. He seldom gives impressions 
or sentiments. He has a hunger for all kinds of items ; give him 
these and the sentiments will take care of themselves. Occa- 
sionally he concludes with a description that sets the items 
in some higher relation and shows the processes that are going 
on in his own mind ; as when, after giving some dozen particulars 
in the process of manufacturing papier-mache, he closes the list 
of catch-words with this : " It is the art of creating plastic wood. 
It grows by hand and not by vegetable vitality, then hardens and 
receives Art." 

But it was not items alone that he learned in his travels ; he 
became familiar with objects of which he had read, and gained 
inspiration from a more intimate acquaintance. In Warwick 
Castle and Kenilworth he walked among scenes made vivid to him 
in his youth in the pages of Sir Walter Scott. He entered, as he 
said, " into the very life of that olden time, and took from it its 
good without tasting its evil," 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 341 

Caesar's Tower, which had stood for eight hundred years, co- 
eval with the Norman Conquest, especially aroused his imagina- 
tion : 

" I stood upon its mute stones and imagined the ring of the 
hammer upon them when the mason was laying them to their bed 
of ages. What were the thoughts, the fancies, the conversations 
of these rude fellows at that age of the world ? I was wafted 
backward, and backward, until I stood on the foundations upon 
which old England herself was builded, when as yet there was 
none of her. There, far back of all literature, before the English 
tongue itself was formed, earlier than her jurisprudence and 
than all modern civilization, I stood in imagination, and, revers- 
ing my vision, looked down into a far future to search for the men 
and deeds which had been, as if they were yet to be ; thus 
making a prophecy of history, and changing memory into a 
dreamy foresight. 

" Against these stones, on which I lay my hand, have rung 
the sounds of battle. Yonder, on these very grounds, there raged, 
in sight of men that stand where I do, fiercest and deadliest con- 
flicts. All this ground has fed on blood. . . . 

" I walked across to Guy's Tower, up its long stone stair- 
way, into some of its old soldiers' rooms. The pavements were 
worn, though of stone, with the heavy, grinding feet of men-at- 
arms. I heard them laugh between their cups, I saw them de- 
vouring their gross food, I heard them recite their feats, or tell 
the last news of some knightly outrage or cruel oppression of the 
despised laborer. I stood by the window out of which the 
archer sent his whistling arrows. I stood by the openings 
through which scalding water or molten lead was poured upon 
the heads of the assailants, and heard the hoarse shriek of the 
wretched fellows who got the shocking baptism. I ascended to 
the roof of the tower, and looked over the wide glory of the 
scene, still haunted with the same imaginations of olden time. 
How many thoughts had flown hence besides mine ! — here where 
warriors looked out or ladies watched for their knights' return. 
How did I long to stand for one hour, really, in their position 
and in their consciousness who lived in those days ; and then 
to come back, with the new experience, to my modern self ! " 

In this is shown his sympathy with the old Saxon yeomanry, 
and was his Saxon ancestry taking voice ; all the romantic, pictur- 



342 BIOGRAPHY OF , 

esque elements of his nature were fed, and ran, like the streams of 
springtide, full-banked to the sea. 

We next find in his note-book these items and references : 

" Approach to Stratford-on-Avon. How peaceful the associa- 
tions in contrast with those of Warwick and Kenilworth ! " 

" The place : old English houses ; Red Horse Inn." 

" Birds : thrush, lark, nightingale, sparrow, robin, starling, 
rooks, cuckoo." 

" A different but, to me, even greater interest attaches to Avon 
from the throngs from every nation that have visited it." 

" Shakspere : eleven years old when Elizabeth visited Kenil- 
worth." 

" No greater change can be imagined than from the warlike 
towers of Guy of Warwick to the quiet home of Shakspere, Strat- 
ford-on-Avon." The change in his experience was equally 
marked. In the one the martial spirit of the warrior, in the 
other the loving, receptive spirit of the prophet and poet, were 
aroused and fed. In Stratford-on-Avon he had one of those lu- 
minous hours which were, in his experience, like Mountains of 
Transfiguration. 

In a letter to a friend describing a Sabbath here, written at 
this time, he says : 

" The scenes of Saturday had fired me ; every visit to various 
points in Stratford-on-Avon added to the inspiration, until, as I 
sallied forth to church, I seemed not to haVe a body. I could 
hardly feel my feet striking against the ground ; it was as if I 
were numb. But my soul was clear, penetrating, and exquisitely 
susceptible. . . . 

"I had been anxious lest some Cowper's ministerial fop 
should officiate, and the sight of this aged man was good. The 
form of his face and head indicated firmness, but his features were 
suffused with an expression of benevolence. 

" He ascended the reading-desk and the services began. You 
know my mother was, until her marriage, in the communion of 
the Episcopal Church. This thought hardly left me while I sat, 
grateful for the privilege of worshipping God through a service 
that had expressed so often her devotions. I cannot tell you how 
much I was affected. I had never had such a trance of worship, 
and I shall never have such another view until I gain the Gate. 

"I am so ignorant of the church service that I cannot call 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 343 

the various parts by their right names, but the portions which 
most affected me were the prayers and responses which the choir 
sang. I had never heard any part of a supplication, a direct 
prayer, chanted by a choir, and it seemed as though I heard not 
with my ear but with my soul. I was dissolved ; my whole being 
seemed to me like an incense wafted gratefully toward God. 
The divine presence rose before me in wondrous majesty, but of 
ineffable gentleness and goodness, and I could not stay away 
from more familiar approach, but seemed irresistibly yet gently 
drawn toward God. My soul, then thou didst magnify the Lord 
and rejoice in the God of thy salvation ! And then came to my 
mind the many exultations of the Psalms of David, and never 
before were the expressions and figures so noble and so neces- 
sary to express what I felt. I had risen, it seemed to me, so high 
as to be where David was when his soul conceived the things 
which he wrote. Throughout the service — and it was an hour 
and a quarter long — whenever an ' Amen ! ' occurred it was given 
by the choir accompanied by the organ and the congregation. 
Oh ! that swell and solemn cadence rings in my ear yet ! 

" Not once, not a single time, did it occur in that service with- 
out bringing tears from my eyes. I stood like a shrub on a 
spring morning — every leaf covered with dew, and every breeze 
shook down some drops. I trembled so much at times that I 
was obliged to sit down. Oh ! when in the prayers, breathed 
forth in strains of sweet, simple, solemn music, the love of Christ 
was recognized, how I longed then to give utterance to what that 
love seemed to me. There was a moment in which the heavens 
seemed opened to me and I saw the glory of God ! All the 
earth seemed to me a store-house of images made to set forth the 
Redeemer, and I could scarcely be still from crying out. I never 
knew, I never dreamed before of what heart there was in that 
word amen. Every time it swelled forth and died away solemn- 
ly, not my lips, not my mind, but my whole being said : ' Saviour, 
so let it be.' 

" The sermon was preparatory to the communion, which I 
then first learned was to be celebrated. It was plain and good ; 
and although the rector had done many things in a way that led 
me to suppose that he sympathized with over-much ceremony, 
yet in his sermon he seemed evangelical and gave a right view 
of the Lord's Supper. 



344 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" For the first time in my life I went forward to commune in 
an Episcopal church. Without any intent of my own, but be- 
cause from my seat it was nearest, I knelt down at the altar, with 
the dust of Shakspere beneath my feet. I thought of it as I 
thought of ten thousand other things, without the least disturb- 
ance of devotion. It seemed as if I stood upon a place so high 
that, like one looking over a wide valley, all objects conspired to 
make but one view. I thought of the General Assembly and 
Church of the First-Born, of my mother and brother and chil- 
dren in heaven, of my living family on earth, of you, of the whole 
church entrusted to my hands — they afar off, I upon the banks 
of the Avon." 

He did not forget his old friends, birds and trees. From 
Stratford-on-Avon he writes : 

" As I stood looking over on the masses of foliage and the 
single trees dotted in here and there, I could see every shade of 
green, and all of them most beautiful, and as refreshing to me as 
old friends. After standing awhile to take a last view of Strat- 
ford-on-Avon from this high ground and the beautiful slopes 
around it, and of the meadows of the Avon, I began to walk 
homeward, when I heard such an outbreak behind me as wheeled 
me about quick enough. There he flew, singing as he rose, and 
rising gradually, not directly up, but with gentle slope — there was 
the free-singing lark, not half so happy to sing as I was to hear. 
In a moment more he had reached the summit of his ambition 
and suddenly fell back to the grass again. And now if you 
laugh at my enthusiasm I will pity you for the want of it. I have 
heard one poet's lark, if I never hear another, and am much hap- 
pier for it." 

At Oxford a new world opened to him — that of an English 
university town enriched with the growth and associations of 
seven hundred years. The beauty of its architecture, its clois- 
tered quiet, its galleries, and, most of all, its libraries, impressed 
him. 

" Few places affect me more than libraries, and especially the 
Bodleian Library, reputed to have half a million printed books 
and manuscripts. I walked solemnly and reverently among the 
alcoves and through the halls, as if in the pyramid of embalmed 
souls. It was their life, their heart, their mind, that they trea- 
sured in these book-urns. Silent as they are, should all the 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 345 

emotions that went to their creation have utterance, could the 
world itself contain the various sounds ? They longed for fame ! 
Here it is — to stand silently for ages, moved only to be dusted and 
catalogued, valued only as units in the ambitious total, and gazed 
at occasionally by men ignorant as I am of their name, their 
place, their language, and their worth. Indeed, unless a man can 
link his written thoughts with the everlasting wants of men, so 
that they shall draw from them as from wells, there is no more 
immortality to the thoughts and feelings of the soul than to the 
muscles and the bones. A library is but the soul's burial-ground. 
It is the land of shadows." 

It was, however, not all shadowy. 

"Noon Refection. — * What will you take to drink, Oxford 
ale or a little wine ? ' Cold water. ' Oh ! not cold water, surely ? 
A little sherry and water? ' ' Surely you will not come to England 
to drink cold water ? ' My dear sir, I am a thorough-going teeto- 
taler, and you surely would not have me come to England to lose 
my good principles ? 'Why, sir, I am not a teetotaler, but I am 
a temperance man — was never drunk in my life — but you sur- 
prise me ! ' 

" Dining and tea-room of Fellows. Elaborate carved oak — 
no sham. In all respects college in quadrangle proposes to take 
care of its students, head and stomach, soul, intellect, and body, 
and therefore has added kitchen to library." 

"London, August 9. — Arrived last night. Old Bell. Visited 
Trafalgar Square and Westminster Abbey, Guildhall, Bank of 
England, Tower, Tunnel, etc." 

In London something of the old-time sadness came over him, 
with the old-time sources of relief : 

" Now, too, I am apt, if I do not fall asleep soon enough — or 
more frequently when I awake, hours before it is the fashion here 
to get up — to lie and think over my way of life hitherto ; and 
my life-work seems to me to be so little, and so poorly done, that 
I feel discouraged at the thought of resuming it ! I have every- 
where in my travelling — at the shrine of the martyrs in Oxford, at. 
the graves of Bunyan and Wesley in London, at the vault in 
which Raleigh was for twelve years confined in the Tower — asked 
myself whether I could have done and endured what they did, 
and as they did ! It is enough to make one tremble for himself 
to have such a heart-sounding as this gives him. I cast the lead 



-5 



46 BIOGRAPHY OF 



for the depth of my soul, and it strikes so soon that I have little 
reason for pride. 

" Had it not been for paintings, and flowers, and trees, and 
the landscapes, I do not know what I should have done with my- 
self. Often when extremely distressed I have gone to the parks 
or out of the city to some quiet ground where I could find a 
wooded stream, and the woods filled with birds, and found, 
almost in a moment, a new spirit coming over me. I was rid of 
men, almost of myself. I seemed to find a sacred sweetness and 
calmness, not coming over me, but into me. I seemed nearer to 
heaven. I felt less sadness about life, for God would take care 
of it ; and my own worthlessness, too, became a source of com- 
posure, for on that very account it made little difference in the 
world's history whether I lived or died. God worked, it seemed 
to me, upon a scale so vast and rich in details that anything and 
anybody could be spared and not affect the results of life." 

He crossed over to Paris in August, and his note-book gives 
us catch-words and sentences evidently intended for reminders 
of sights, incidents, and adventures that he wished to remember. 
So disconnected are they that they are of little worth except as 
showing what interested him in this great city on this his first 
visit, and as affording the raw materials out of which grew his 
letters and more finished descriptions. 

When he arrived, by what route, at what hotel he stopped, he 
apparently did not think worth noting ; but what he saw in the 
life of the people he wished to cemember, and the first few pages 
of his diary are filled with items like these : " Three mothers with 
their babies." " Boy and sister frolicking, six or seven years 
old." "Family on seat; little thing talking, about three years 
old." "Twelve soldiers going to relieve sentinels." "Stand for 
flowers," etc. 

Next to the life of the common people the largest space in 
his diary is given to the art-galleries. On two pages he jots 
down " Effect of Gallery on my Mind " : 

"1st. Astonishment, at number and exquisite character, be- 
yond what had expected — not of something finer, but such as to 
make me feel that before I had not seen anything. 

" 2d. Then sense of intense pleasure, from what do not stop 
to inquire. It is not color, form, composition, nor mere sym- 
pathy with thing expressed. It is the whole. The walls flame 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 347 

out as if the hall was a summer and all shining in concentration 
upon you. I see all that is painted — and more. I see, beyond, 
other visions, the mute figures speak. I imagine the scene be- 
fore the time chosen and afterwards. 

"3d. Then comes sense of beauty, complex, of rich and ex- 
quisite coloring ; also the beauty of the scenes. The objects, in 
other words, and the instrument of their manifestation. 

" 4th. Then you begin to select and to hang in a dreamy re- 
view over one or another. Time is not known ; you wake by 
some footfall. Whether you have been here an hour or four you 
cannot tell ; it seems by the populous experience a long time. 
You do not weary, but you exhale — i.e., the senses seem to flag, 
while mind is keener than ever, and you imagine rather than see ; 
as one who is exhilarated by wine sees, to be sure, but his own 
mind affords the color and — " 

In his letters he afterwards enlarged upon this topic : " Ah ! 
what a new world has been opened to me, and what a new sense 
within myself ! I knew that I had gradually grown fond of pic- 
tures from my boyhood. I had felt the power of some few. But 
nothing had ever come up to a certain ideal that had hovered in 
my mind, and I supposed I was not fine enough to appreciate with 
discrimination the works of masters. To find myself absolutely 
intoxicated ; to find my system so much affected that I could not 
control my nerves ; to find myself trembling, and laughing, and 
weeping, and almost hysterical, and that in spite of my shame and 
determination to behave better — such a power of these galleries 
over me I had not expected. I have lived for two days in fairy- 
land, wakened out of it by some few sights which I have mechani- 
cally visited, more for the sake of pleasing friends at home, when 
I return, than for a present pleasure to myself, but relapsing again 
into the golden vision. . . . 

"I could not tell whether hours or minutes were passing. 
It was a blessed exhalation of soul, in which I seemed freed from 
matter, and, as a diffused intelligence, to float in the atmos- 
phere. I could not believe that a dull body was the centre from 
which thought and emotion radiated. I had a sense of expan- 
sion, of etherealization, which gave me some faint sense of a 
spiritual state. Nor was I in a place altogether unfitted for such 
a state. The subject of many of the works — suffering, heroic 
resistance, angels, Arcadian scenes, especially the scenes of 



348 BIOGRAPHY OF 

Christ's life and death — seemed not unfitting accompaniment to 
my mind, and suggested to me, in a glorious vision, the drawing 
near of a redeemed soul to the precincts of heaven ! Oh ! with 
what an outburst of soul did I implore Christ to wash me, and 
all whom I loved, in His precious blood, that we might not fail 
of entering the glorious city whose builder and maker is God ! 
All my sins seemed not only sins but great deformities. They 
seemed not merely affronts against God but- insults to my own 
nature ! My soul snuffed at them and trod them down as the 
mire in the street. Then, holy and loving thoughts toward God 
or toward man seemed to me to be as beautiful as those fleecy 
islets along the west at sunset, crowned with glory ; and the 
gentler aspirations for goodness and nobleness and knowledge 
seemed to me like silver mists through which the morning is 
striking, wafting them gently and in wreaths and films heaven- 
ward. Great deeds, heroism for worthy objects, for God, or for 
one's fellows, or for one's own purity, seemed not only natural 
but as things without which a soul could not live. 

" But at length I perceived myself exhausted, not by any 
sense of fatigue (I had no sense or body), but by perceiving that 
my mind would not fix upon material objects, but strove to act 
by itself. Thus a new picture was examined only for an instant, 
and then I exhaled into all kinds of golden dreams and visions. 

" I left the gallery, and in this mood, as I threaded my way 
back, how beautiful did everything and everybody seem ! The 
narrow streets were beautiful for being narrow, and the broad 
ones for being broad ; old buildings had their glory, and new 
structures had theirs ; children were all glorified children ; I 
loved the poor workmen that I saw in the confined and narrow 
shops ; the various women, young and old, with huge buck-bas- 
kets, or skipping hither and thither on errands, all seemed happy, 
and my soul blessed them as I passed. 

" My own joy of being overflowed upon everything which I 
met. Sometimes singing to myself, or smiling to others so as to 
make men think, doubtless, that I had met some good luck or 
was on some prosperous errand of love, I walked on through 
street after street, turning whichever corner, to the right or left, 
happened to please the moment, neither knowing or caring where 
I went, but always finding something to see and enjoying all 
things. Nor do I know yet by what instinct I rounded up my 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



349 



journeyings by finding my proper lodging. That night I slept, 
as to my body, but felt little difference between dreaming asleep 
and dreaming awake." 

We turn from his note-book and letters to one of the papers of 
the day, and read : " Rev. H. W. Beecher, our esteemed brother, 
has returned from his transatlantic trip with improved health. 
He reached New York yesterday (evening) in the Asia, Septem- 
ber ii." 

He arrived unexpectedly and found his family, which had 
been spending the summer at Sutton, Mass., with the grandmo- 
ther, awaiting him. His trip had been a success in every par- 
ticular. Not only was his health restored, but his field of obser- 
vation had been vastly broadened and his experiences greatly 
deepened. England, the home of his race, had been seen and 
touched ; he had visited her castles, colleges, and churches ; 
walked among her fields, become acquainted with her people ; and 
henceforth her noble history, great achievements, and mighty 
names seemed more real to him, and she was more admired and 
beloved than ever. 

In Paris he became conscious for the first time of the power 
of true art, and began that study of it which only ended with his 
life. 

But, whether in England or France, so well read was he in 
the history of the places visited, and so vivid was his imagina- 
tion to bring back the scenes and men that made these places 
memorable, that his journey was as a sojourn with the wisest and 
best of our race, and he returned from it refreshed and enlarged 
for the work that, for a few weeks, had been laid aside. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

Church and Steamboat — Jenny Lind — Hospitality — Colonel Pertzel — The 
Family — Twins — Medicine — Giving Counsel — For the Sailor — An Ab- 
surd Story Contradicted — Salisbury — Trouting — Death of Alfred and 
Arthur — Letters to his Daughter at School — Lenox — Equivocal Honors 
Declined — The Pulpit — "Plymouth Collection " — "Shining Shore" 
A Church Liturgy — Courting with his Father's old Love-letters — 1857 a 
Year of Trial — Matteawan — Visit to Litchfield — 1858 a Year of Harvest 
— Revival Meetings — Hospitality of Plymouth Church — Courtesy to 
Errorists — New Organ — Peekskill — Letters to his Daughter abroad — 
Marriage of his Daughter — Lecturing — Title of D.D. declined — Flowers 
in Church — Christian Liberty in the Use of the Beautiful — His two 
Lines of Labor. 

NO sooner has he put his foot on shore than he is engaged in 
battle. This time it is against religious bigotry and in- 
tolerance upon the seas. A Star article from his pen ap- 
peared September 19 upon " Church and Steamboat — Cunard 
Line " : 

No religious service was allowed on the steamers except 
that which was appointed for the crew, at which the passengers 
were permitted to be present. No one was allowed to read the 
service there except the captain, who, having been playing cards 
late Saturday night, and being addicted to the sailor habit of pro- 
fanity, was not considered fit for the office. No one at all was 
permitted to preach, or, if the rule were ever varied, only a clergy- 
man of Episcopal ordination. One of the owners, who happened 
to be on the ship, when courteously asked to allow some one of 
the nine clergymen on board to preach, and to give the use of 
one of the several cabins to those who chose to have service of 
their own, lost his temper and said that if Americans did not 

choose to go on his line, " d 'em ! they may go to h ." 

All this appeared to Mr. Beecher as rank injustice and an inter- 
ference with the freedom of worship of multitudes of travellers. 
Humorously, yet with good, solid, set phrase, he denounces this 
bigotry in the article above mentioned. Like most of his ar- 
ticles, it was strong enough to draw the fire of the enemy. 

350 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 



351 



The captain and the son of this owner reply in letters which 
partly explain, partly deny, but wholly charge Mr. Beecher with 
falsehood. This brings another article from him in the next 
issue, September 26 : 

" It is not to be supposed, gentlemen, that either of you can 
sympathize fully with me in an inveterate prejudice which I have 
contracted against lying in all its moods and tenses. But, really, 
I feel hurt that you have so low an opinion of my ingenuity as to 
suppose that, if I set out to tell lies, I should tell such poor and 
graceless ones. 

" Allow me to assure you, gentlemen, that while my principles 
forbid me to employ falsehood, yet should I attempt it I should 
conscientiously endeavor to lie well." 

He reiterates his charges, adds to them some further remarks 
upon the gambling habits of the captain, which unfit him to act 
as conductor of public worship, procures affidavits from respon- 
sible parties to substantiate his charges, and refers them to the 
courts for redress, if they think themselves aggrieved. 

The first battle upon his return to his native land was waged 
for freedom of worship upon the high seas ! 

In this same month of September, Jenny Lind came to this 
country and began that series of concerts which have never 
been surpassed. Her first concert in Castle Garden, Septem- 
ber 11, netted $30,000. Some of the papers having criticised 
her and her manager for the high price of tickets, and the com- 
munity for paying it, Mr. Beecher takes up the cudgels in her 
behalf : 

" Jenny Lind, if we understand her desires and aims, is em- 
ploying a resplendent musical genius in the most noble accord- 
ance with the spirit of the Gospel. In her we behold a spectacle 
of eminent genius employing its magic power in the elevation of 
the human race. 

" If men would spare from the disgusting weed and poisonous 
liquors one-half of what they spend every month, there are few 
so poor as not to be able to hear Jenny Lind. * " 

One of his children gives this incident : 

" In those early days father always had a flower-garden in the 
back-yard of our city homes. I remember when we lived in the 
little, brown wooden house on Columbia Heights, Jenny Lind 
came to board near us for a short time. All the neighboring 



352 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

children used to gather round her door to see her start for her 
drive ; and one day when we saw the carriage in front of her 

house, I ran in to ask father if H and I could go and see her 

come out. He was at work in the garden among his flowers, 
and, after giving his consent, called me back, cut a handful of 
roses, and told me I could take those and give them to her. So 

off H and I went, but I believe, after all, my courage failed, 

and I brought them home again, very much ashamed. Father 
laughed, but comforted me by saying he'd rather I would be too 
shy than too bold." 

He closes this eventful year (1850) with two Star articles — 
the one (December 12), " Remember the Poor": " Upon the 
whole, we doubt if there is any other means of grace so profitable 
to a Christian as the whole duty of relieving the poor; for giving 
money is but a small part, and often the least effective part, of 
duty to them. Every man ought to take a single case or family, 
and look after them through the winter." Another (December 
19) upon " Different Ways of Giving": "Now and then you 
will find a man whose face is March but whose pocket is June. 
He will storm and scold at you, but send you away with ten 
times as much as you asked." 

Mr. Beecher was very hospitable, and kept open house for 
friends, and even for such chance acquaintance as came to be as- 
sociated with him. " When Kossuth was in this country, Colonel 
Pertzel, his chief of staff, with his wife, stopped with us for 
several weeks. When they went away she gave me her bracelet 
of national coins, which, she said, was prized by the Hungarian 
women in their exile above all their possessions. 

" Our own family circle at this time consisted of father, mo- 
ther, and three children — two boys and a girl. Besides these 
Aunt Esther was with us, whom I remember as little and round, 
straight and precise, with snapping black eyes, looking after the 
second generation of nephews and nieces, and telling us stories ; 
and also Grandma Bullard, doing the mending and cosseting 
while she sang ' Bounding Billow ' and \ Like the Hart and the 
Roe.' Dear, ideal old grandmother ! " 

December 20, 1852, there was an addition to this circle. "I 
can remember sitting in the parlor one evening with Aunt Esther, 
and father's coming in, going up to her, and kissing her first on 
one cheek and then on the other, and her giving a little jump, 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 353 

saying, ' Not two, Henry ! " and his answering, ' Yes, two.' Then 
he told me that I had two little new brothers up-stairs. 

" Father was so proud of these twins that I remember on New 
Year's day he took fifteen or twenty of the Hungarians who were 
making New Year's calls up into mother's room to see them." 

At the Thanksgiving service of this year Mr. Beecher had 
announced that an effort would be made to raise by subscription 
the sum of $13,000 to pay off the floating debt of the church be- 
fore January 1, and the papers of a later date contain the an- 
nouncement that the sum was promptly subscribed, " and Ply- 
mouth Church may now be considered on a firm foundation in 
temporal matters, and is in every way in a prosperous condition." 

The church entered the new year, 1852, without debt, and 
more than ten thousand dollars were realized from the rent of 
the pews. 

Evidently he begins the year with especial effort to overcome 
spiritual coldness among the people, and bring in the summer of 
Christian life and growth, for his Star Papers are upon subjects 
like these : " Ice in the Church," " Various Convictions of Sin," 
and later are announcements in the papers of morning prayer- 
meetings in " Plymouth Church," "Preaching Every Evening." 

In due time the announcement is made that " sixty persons 
were last Sabbath morning received into the church, fifty upon 
profession of faith." 

He is experiencing one of the evils to which religious meet- 
ings are prone, and concerning it he sends out a note of warn- 
ing, "One Cause of Dull Meetings": 

"We hardly know of a more unprofitable exercise for social 
meetings than what is called exhortation. Men impose upon 
themselves and social meetings degenerate into absurd formalities 
— a pretence of caring for what they do not care for, of renounc- 
ing what all the world knows they do not renounce, of asking for 
what they do not desire and desiring what they dare not ask." 

Through life Mr. Beecher was as free with pathies in medi- 
cine as of isms in religion, and used allopathy, homoeopathy, 
hydropathy, electricity, or hand-rubbing, as seemed to him at the 
time most likely to secure the coveted result. In general he 
trusted more to the man than to the system. His position on 
this matter, which he held substantially for years, is given in a 
review of a medical work : 



354 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" In good earnest, we regard medicine with little favor. Our 
first recipe for sickness is, not to get sick. Our second is reli- 
ance upon a well-bred, sensible doctor. We select the doctor. 
It is his business to select the medicine, and we do not care a 
pin what it is. To all who ask us, therefore, what school we be- 
long to, we reply : 'We are firmly persuaded of Dr. .' This 

is the sum of our present creed." 

His interest in common men and their affairs brought many 
to him by letter or in personal conversation for advice in their 
difficulties. Probably few physicians or lawyers in good practice 
were consulted by more people than came daily to Mr. Beecher. 
So practical were his principles of action, so great his sympathy 
with men in trouble, and such his ability to see through the diffi- 
culty, that men came to him for counsel from far and near. 

A man asks him as to his duty to his creditors under certain 
peculiar circumstances which he mentions. Mr. Beecher goes 
over the matter in detail, states the ground of difficulty in that 
and all similar cases, and points out the way of relief in this 
fruitful sentence : " Selfishness is the great mischief-maker in 
settlements. Men think of their own rights first and their 
creditors' afterwards. Reverse this. Be careful first that no man 
suffer by you." 

Again, at this time a man writes asking as to the duty of a 
temperance man and a professor of religion in regard to selling 
liquor as an agent. 

"... He, therefore, who loves his situation or his pocket 
more than his religion can expect but little sympathy from ro- 
bust Christians, and little favor from that Christ of the cross 
who has ordered a church of cross-bearing disciples. But we 
will turn our friend in such a dilemma over to our friend Hall, 
a drayman in New York, who utterly refuses to cart liquor, who 
will not unload a ship if in so doing he must cart brandy. For 
he says he will not disgrace any horse that he owns by letting 
him be seen with a load of liquor behind him." 

While carrying a free lance ready as any knight of old to 
champion every cause that was suffering injustice, we want to 
emphasize the fact that he had none of that small, truculent spirit 
that leads to personal attacks. He was very lenient to individ- 
ual human failures, charitable in his judgments, and would rather 
attempt to save by hiding than to punish by exposing them. In 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 355 

answer to a question which we once asked concerning a man 
who, to our mind, had greatly transgressed the limits of public 
propriety, if not of morality, " Why don't you pitch in and show 
up this matter ? " this man of a thousand battles said quietly, 
with just a shade of rebuke for the spirit we had shown in his 
tone : " I don't like to pitch into folks as much as some do." 
But when wrong or injustice had wrought itself into a system, 
it made no difference to him how high in position they were who 
upheld it, or how low in the scale were the sufferers, or how se- 
curely entrenched was the wrong ; he waited for no invitation, he 
asked no permission, he sought for no support, but attacked it at 
once, aiming to expose and remove the root element of the evil. 

An illustration of this characteristic of Mr. Beecher is af- 
forded by an article written by him at this time upon " Naval 
Discipline," in which he brings to the sailor the same broad sym- 
pathy, established principles, and clear reasoning that he was ac- 
customed to employ in the case of another and very different 
class : 

" . . . It is of little use to cobble a system whose radical idea 
is wrong. This is our judgment in the case of the American 
navy. The republican institutions of America, slavery always 
excepted, contemplate the improvement and elevation of the 
masses. Government does not undertake to educate the citizen, 
but it contemplates, it is obliged from its origin to accommodate 
itself to the radical idea of, the liberty of the people to move 
among themselves, to guide, to change, to advance freely in any 
direction. The American navy is a monarchy. Its subjects are 
regarded in but one light — they are to be under service. More than 
this nothing is thought of. Sailors have no liberty. There is 
neither provision for, nor expectation of, improvement. . . . 
There must be an entirely new spirit infused into the whole sys- 
tem of such service. 

"... In short, the naval system must address the social 
and moral need of the sailor. They must be allowed to act 
under all those high motives which develop men on shore." 

While moved by these world-wide sympathies, he was in no 
mood to submit with patience to bigotry nearer home, and utters 
a very strong protest against the ostracizing of certain Sabbath- 
schools by the orthodox schools of Brooklyn in their yearly pa- 
rade : 



356 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" We ought to seize such an occasion to promote kindly feel- 
ings and cultivate such sympathy as differing sects might lawfully 
have in common. There is no liberality in urging this matter ; 
it is simply common sense and common decency. . . . 

" Does the (paper) regard it as dangerous to walk the 

streets with a Unitarian ? Is heresy like smallpox, so contagious 
that one school will give it to another by sitting for an hour in 
the same audience-room with it ? . . . We shall pray more ear- 
nestly than ever for the advance of that day when the love of God 
shall abound in the hearts of men and inspire men to love each 
other." 

His Star Papers of 1852 close with this, which will at once 
be recognized as eminently characteristic : 

" We had always supposed that absurd stories grew in this vi- 
cinity like weeds in the tropics or trees planted by rivers. For 
once, however, the country newspapers have got ahead of our 
neighborhood. 

" We have made diligent search, taken the census, examined 
every cradle, drawer, closet, crib, nook, and corner, and are pre- 
pared to affirm the following story, which was born in the Wind- 
ham County Telegraph, the Norwich Tribune, Springfield Re- 
publican, Boston Chronicle, and other papers, to be exaggerated : 

" ' Rev. H. W. Beecher's lady has presented him with five little 
responsibilities in a little better than one year : two soon after 
the arrival of Kossuth and three the other day.' 

" Twins there were a year ago whose blessed faces fill the 
house with light, but the three above-mentioned were born of those 
maternal editors whose brains fulfil the prophet's word, ' Ye 
shall consume chaff ; ye shall bring forth stubble.' 

" We turn these mousing, mongering editors over to the 
next woman's-rights convention ; or, if they are not fit for a seat 
there, they may amuse the children with nursery tales while 
the mothers are at discussion ; or, if not fit for that, let them 
in mercy be bound out as very dry nurses at some foundling 
hospital." 

He spends the summer of 1853, as he had the one preceding, 
at Salisbury, Connecticut. 

" Once more we find ourselves at home among lucid green 
trees, among hills and mountains, with lakes and brooks on every 
side, and country roads threading their way in curious circuits 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 357 

among them. All day long we have moved about with dreamy- 
newness of life. Birds, crickets, and grasshoppers are the only 
players upon instruments that molest the air. Chanticleer is at 
this instant proclaiming over the whole valley that the above de- 
claration is a slander on his musical gifts. Very well ; add chan- 
ticleer to cricket, grasshopper, and bird. Add, also, a cow, for I 
hear her distant low melodious through the valley, with all rough- 
ness strained out by the trees through which it comes hitherward. 
O this silence in the air, this silence on the mountains, this silence 
on the lakes ! " 

He closes a long letter upon trouting in this fashion : 

" You forget your errand. You select a dry, tufty knoll, and, 
lying down, you gaze up into the sky. O those depths ! Some- 
thing in you reaches out and yearns. You have a vague sense of 
infinity, of vastness, of the littleness of human life, and the sweet- 
ness and grandeur of divine life and of eternity. You people 
that vast ether. You stretch away through it and find that celes- 
tial city beyond, and therein dwell oh! how many that are yours ! 
Tears come unbidden. You begin to long for release. You 
pray. Was there ever a better closet ? Under the shadow of the 
mountain, the heavens full of cloudy cohorts, like armies of 
horsemen and chariots, your soul is loosened from the narrow 
judgments of human life, and touched with a full sense of im- 
mortality and the liberty of a spiritual state. An hour goes past. 
How full has it been of feelings struggling to be thoughts, and 
thoughts deliquescing into feeling ! Twilight is coming. You 
have miles to ride home. Not a trout in your basket ! Never 
mind ; you have fished in the heavens and taken great store of 
prey. Let them laugh at your empty basket. Take their raillery 
good-naturedly ; you have certainly had good luck." 

The sadness which is plainly visible in the passage quoted is 
an old acquaintance. We have learned to expect its appearance 
somewhere at every feast. At this time undoubtedly it comes 
the oftener because of the sorrowful experiences of the early 
summer. The twins, Alfred and Arthur, " whose blessed faces 
fill the house with light," had both died on the fourth of July 
of this year, and been buried in the same grave. 

It was one of the deep sorrows of his life, seldom mentioned 
save when attempting by his sympathy to comfort others in like 
affliction ; it became a fountain of deep and tender feeling for all 



358 BIOGRAPHY OF 

in distress, and of earnest longings for the rest and the reunions 
of heaven. 

The going away of his daughter to boarding-school during 
the autumn makes another break in the family, to which he re- 
fers in a letter in November : 

"... This is the first departure of any of my children from 
home, and it is an experience which testifies to my affection for 
you and my solicitude; yet I do not in the least doubt that you 
will do well. . . . 

" There is little news at home. Your room is occupied by 

E B , who now lives with us and takes care of W . 

She seems a very good girl, and W is getting very fond of 

her. He makes no resistance to her dressing him, and submits 
even to having his hair curled with great peace. The rogue is fat 
and happy, and opens his big eyes with a half-tearful, dreamy look 
when we ask him : Where is Sister If ? . . . 

"We are all going to Aunty H 's to dinner, and in the 

evening Mrs. H and family will come round there too. As 

for me, I am in the agony of writing my Thanksgiving ser- 
mon. . . . 

" There, H , I have made quite an effort, for me, at 

letter-writing and news-telling. Let me hear from you. 

"Your loving father, 

" H. W. B." 

In a letter to her the following June he mentions an impor- 
tant domestic event : 

"Brooklyn, June 24, 1854. 
" My dear H : 

" I must answer your last letter to me before you leave, lest I 
lose my repute as a good and frequent correspondent; and I am 
the more willing to do it as I have very agreeable tidings to com- 
municate to you. 

" You will receive a visit from W A , of our church, 

whom I presume you remember. Well, it has been thought best, 
after consultation, and some mysterious correspondence with 

your Aunt S which you may have noticed, that you should 

meet me at Cleveland and spend the next Sabbath there, July 2 ; 
go to Painesville and spend July 4 with me there ; and then come 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 359 

back at our leisure to see your mother and a new little brother 
who was safely born into this world on last Thursday, June 22, 
at three o'clock in the afternoon, weighing ten pounds, and filling 
all people's hearts with joy at his health and general peaceable 
qualities. As yet we have fallen upon no name. . . . 

" . . . Meanwhile young Master Nameless is sleeping off all 
traces of remembrance of that former state of existence from 
which Edward supposes him to be an emigrant to this world. . . . 

"R W. B." 

This year he spent the summer in Lenox, Berkshire County, 
Massachusetts, where a few friends have aided him to purchase 
a farm, "which the deeds, with great definiteness, say contains 
ninety-six acres, more or less." Annoyed by the inquisitiveness 
of certain newspapers, he goes on to say : 

" We gave for farm and farm-buildings $4,500 ; for the crops, 
stock, implements, etc., $1,000 more ; total, $5,500. Any person 
in search of useful information can have further particulars as to 
terms of payment and any other private publicities by personal 
application to us." 

His emotions upon taking possession are described in a letter 
of that date : 

" It was in the presence of this pasture elm, which we name 
the Queen, that we first felt to our very marrow that we had in- 
deed become owners of the soil ! It was with a feeling of awe 
that we looked up into its face, and when I whispered to myself, 
' This is mine,' there was a shrinking, as if there were sacrilege 
in the very thought of property in such a creature of God as this 
cathedral-topped tree ! Does a man bare his head in some old 
church ? So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, 
and looking up into that completed glory at which three hun- 
dred years have been at work with noiseless fingers ! What was 
I in its presence but a grasshopper ? My heart said, ' I may not 
call thee property, and that property of mine ! Thou belongest 
to the air. Thou art the child of summer. Thou art the mighty 
temple where birds praise God. Thou belongest to no man's 
hand, but to all men's eyes that do love beauty, and that have 
learned through beauty to behold God ! Stand, then, in thine 
own beauty and grandeur ! I shall be a lover and a protector, 
to keep drought from thy roots and the axe from thy trunk.' " 



360 BIOGRAPHY OF 

Although the owner of the farm, we are not to suppose that 
he took hold of work as the neighboring farmers did. We fancy 
that his love of downright hard work exhausted itself in the 
West. 

" The chief use of a farm, if it be well selected and of a 
proper soil, is to lie down upon. Mine is an excellent farm for 
such uses, and I thus cultivate it every day. Large crops are 
the consequence, of great delight and fancies more than the 
brain can hold. My industry is exemplary. Though but a week 
here, I have lain down more hours and in more places than that 
hard-working brother of mine in the whole year that he has 
dwelt here. Strange that industrious lying down should come 
so naturally to me, and standing up and lazing about after the 
plough or behind the scythe so naturally to him ! " 

When we remember how many ministers who take an interest 
in public affairs find themselves elected to some town or village 
office, made mayor of a city, sent to the State Legislature or 
even to Congress, we are surprised that Mr. Beecher was never 
elected, so far as we remember, to the smallest public office. 
This was largely owing to the fact that he looked upon the 
work of a preacher, to inspire men to right conduct in public af- 
fairs, as more important than filling any official position, however 
high. 

He declares this opinion facetiously, but none the less as a 
matter of deliberate judgment, in a letter : 

EQUIVOCAL HONORS DECLINED. 

" The Tribune last Saturday, in reply to a private letter asking 
its advice on the matter, recommends that we be nominated for 
Congress, elected and sent, and, when that shall be done, that 
we go. . . . 

" Had the proposal to go to Congress proceeded from the 
American Board of Missions there would have been grave reasons 
for considering it. We doubt whether they have a harder field 
in all heathendom, nor yet a field where the Gospel is more 
needed. But, for mere political reasons, to backslide from the 
pulpit into Congress is a little too long a slide for the first ven- 
ture. We beg to decline in advance." 

In some of the sharp discussions of this year, 1854, the minis- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 36 I 

try have been bitterly criticised by papers who opposed politics 
in public, and a great deal of advice has been given to ministers 
concerning preaching. This receives his attention in this fash- 
ion : 

" When one considers the amount of advice given to min- 
isters about preaching, it is surprising that there should ever be 
again a dull or improper sermon. 

"... We have no doubt that a rigorous landlord, having 
sharked it all the week, screwing and gripping among his tenants, 
would be better pleased on Sunday to doze through an able 
Gospel sermon on divine mysteries than be kept awake by a 
practical sermon that, among other things, set forth the duties of 
a Christian landlord. A broker who has gambled on a magnifi- 
cent scale all the week does not go to church to have his prac- 
tical swindlings analyzed and measured by the ' New Testament 
spirit.' Catechism is what he wants; doctrine is to his taste. A 
merchant whose last bale of smuggled goods was safely stored 
on Saturday night, and his brother-merchant who on the same 
day swore a false invoice through the custom-house — they go 
to church to hear a sermon on faith, on angels, on resurrection. 
As they have nothing invested in those subjects, they expect the 
minister to be bold and orthodox. But if he wants respectable 
merchants to pay ample pew-rents, let him not vulgarize the pul- 
pit by introducing commercial questions. A rich Christian 
brother owns largely in a distillery, and is clamorous against 
letting down to the vulgarity of temperance sermons. Another 
man buys tax-titles and noses around all the week to see who 
can be slipped out of a vacant lot. On Sunday he naturally 
wants us to preach about eternity, or moral ability and inability. 
A mechanic that plies his craft with the unscrupulous appliance 
of every means that will win, he, too, wants "doctrine" on the 
Sabbath — not these secular questions. Men wish two depart- 
ments in life — the secular and the religious. Between them a 
high and opaque wall is to be built. They wish to do just what 
they please for six long days. Then, stepping the other side of 
the wall, they wish the minister to assuage their fears, to comfort 
their conscience, and furnish them a clear ticket and insurance 
for heaven. By such a shrewd management our modern finan- 
ciers are determined to show that a Christian can serve two mas- 
ters, both God and Mammon, at the same time." 



362 BIOGRAPHY OF 

While fully alive to all the advantages of natural forces, the 
Sabbath, the pulpit, and a spiritual church-membership always 
held the highest, place in his regard. 

" It is no small thing, as it regards the education of the com- 
munity, that from their youth up they have been taught to dis- 
cuss all questions from ascertained and authoritative moral 
grounds. . . . 

" The pulpit is the popular religious educator. Its object is 
to stimulate and develop the religious feelings. . . . 

" When a whole community are wont to have their social life, 
their secular business, their public duties taken out of their low 
and selfish attitudes, and lifted up into the light of God's coun- 
tenance, and there measured, judged, repressed, or developed, and 
wholly bathed or inspired by the spirit of conscience and of 
love, then they are receiving a moral education for which there 
is no other provision except the Sabbath and the pulpit. 

" Such are the members that make a church rich — poor in 
this world's goods, but rich toward God — rich in faith, in hope, 
in meekness, in patience, in prayer, and, according to the feeble 
measure of their ability, in good works. Many a church is de- 
stroyed through an ambition of having strong and wealthy men, 
only rich, not holy. . . . 

" It may be very easy to sustain a church that has great wealth 
and little piety, but it is not worth sustaining. It is not a moral 
power." 

He had no confidence in secret political organizations. " One 
might as well study optics in the pyramids of Egypt or the sub- 
terranean tombs of Rome, as liberty in secret conclaves con- 
trolled by hoary knaves versed in political intrigue, who can 
hardly enough express their surprise and delight to find honest 
men going into a wide-spread system of secret caucuses. Honest 
men in such places have the peculiar advantage that flies have in 
a spider's web — the privilege of losing their legs, of buzzing 
without flying, and of being eaten up at leisure by big-bellied 
spiders ! . . . 

" When will men understand that simple, open integrity, an 
unflinching adhesion to principle, is the peculiar advantage of 
truth and liberty? All that the Right asks is air, light, an open 
enemy, and room to strike. It is Wrong that sneaks in the dark 
and gains by the stiletto. * " 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 363 

From time to time he gave examination to modern spiritual- 
ism, with this result : 

" I am a stout unbeliever in the spiritual origin of this pheno- 
menon, either by good spirits, bad spirits, or any spirits whatever. 

" A belief in modern spiritualism seems to weaken the hold 
of the Bible upon conscience, the affections, and to substitute 
diluted sentimentalism and tedious platitudes instead of inspired 
truth." 

In 1855 Mr. Beecher published the "Plymouth Collection." 
Of its history he has spoken somewhat at length : 

" Soon after I came to Brooklyn from the West the conduc- 
tor of music in this church was a Mr. Jones. He was intimately 
associated with the house of Mason Bros., publishers of music in 
New York, and sons of Lowell Mason, of honored and revered 
memory. I desired very much to inaugurate a new day in music 
— that is to say, to transfer to the great congregation on Sunday 
the same methods, so far as singing was concerned, that we had 
already instituted in our evening meetings, our conference meet- 
ings, and our revival meetings — namely, that of having both 
the hymns and the music before them at the same time. 

" I can go back in my memory, easily, to the time when there 
was no hymn-book with notes for church use. The ' Christian 
Lyre,' edited by Joshua Leavitt, was largely used in the revivals 
under Dr. Finney, and 'Christian Songs,' by Mr. Hastings (the 
sweet singer of Israel, whose service to the church was never 
adequately recognized), were also used in revivals. When these 
books came they brought a progeny with them ; but still there 
was nothing of the kind for the great congregation. The music- 
books for choirs were those long, narrow, inconvenient ones 
Avhich could not well be held in the hand, but must always needs 
be laid upon a shelf. These were granted to the choir only, 
and the congregation had to sing from memory or not at all. It 
seemed to me that it would be a step in the right direction to put 
the tunes and hymns together, so that everybody who had the 
one should also have the other. 

" With this end in view I asked the trustees of this church 
to agree to purchase a few copies of the ' Temple Melodies,' a 
small book of hymns, the music for which was to be selected by 
Mr. Jones and myself, and in which I interested the publishing 
house of Mason Bros. 



364 BIOGRAPHY OF 

i( Connected with this was a curious incident. Mason Bros. 
would not publish the book unless we would pay for the stereo- 
type plates ; and the trustees agreed to take a certain number of 
copies of the book — enough to cover the cost of the plates — so 
that the publishers should suffer no loss. When the book came 
to be published there was an acknowledgment of the services 
of Mr. Jones, but my name was not mentioned. Although I did 
not care particularly about that, I was curious to know how it 
should happen that Mr. Jones, conductor of music in my 
church, was personally mentioned, and I, who had given to the 
work time and influence, and who had obtained means with 
which to pay for the plates, was not mentioned at all. Though 
I was the father of the book, everybody else got a slice of the 
credit, and I was left without a crumb. I asked Jones how it 
was, and, blushing up to his ears, he said (if you will pardon the 
adjective) that the publishers said that they would not have the 
name of a d — d abolitionist in their book. 

" This was the first step in that direction. The success of the 
undertaking was such as to satisfy me that a larger endeavor of the 
same sort would be successful also ; and I went to work and laid 
the foundation for the 'Plymouth Collection.' It was to be pub- 
lished by Mr. A. S. Barnes, but it was necessary that there should 
be a guarantee in the form of an advance sufficiently large to pay 
for the plates, that the publishers might run no risk in issuing the 
book. Mr. Henry C. Bowen and Mr. James Freeland agreed to 
furnish the money, with the understanding that when the income, 
if there was one, from our copyright should equal the amount they 
had advanced, with interest, all further profits from the copyright 
should inure to the benefit of the choir of this church. 

" The book has been a profitable one on the whole ; but I 
know not how much the choir has ever received from it. There 
was no written agreement, and the memorandum lapsed. I for- 
got to make any arrangement for myself. The consequence was 
that I was left out in the cold, and never got a penny for my ser- 
vices in the matter. I do not care for that. The object for 
which I was eager and earnest was to procure for the churches a 
book of hymns and tunes, so that they should have both before 
them at the same time. 

" The book was assailed, but was defended, and it made its 
way. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 365 

" Since that time there have been eight or ten books of the 
same general character adopted, and they have so exactly copied 
the ' Plymouth Collection ' as to size, type, and form that you 
may take the eight or ten volumes and set them on a shelf, and 
unless a man stood close to them he could not tell one from the 
other. So that the ' Plymouth Collection ' not only has been a 
good book for this church, but has been a good pattern for other 
churches to follow. Although it was the first one of its kind, it 
was so well adapted to the want of the community that it has not 
been deemed expedient to change in the least degree its form, 
nor to change, except to a very small extent, its method. It has 
invariably proved to be a book acceptable and well suited to the 
purpose for which it was designed. It was made on a theory of 
my own, or rather it was the result of my observation and expe- 
rience. I had observed what hymns appealed to the imagination 
and the affections of the people ; and I did not Delieve that any 
hymn-book would ever be popular which had not in it hymns 
the elements of which appealed to these faculties. I had ob- 
served, also, what tunes the people loved. I had observed that 
any music, however irregular or grotesque, that appealed to their 
imagination and affection, they would adopt and make their 
own. Guided by that observation, I introduced into the book a 
great many melodies of a kind that were unknown in the sobriety 
of the old-fashioned psalmody, but that have been developed 
more fully and skilfully in subsequent books. 

"With that conception of what a hymn-book should be, I was 
very much shocked in a conversation with Mr. Lowell Mason, 
whose services to American music cannot be over-estimated, and 
who lias gone to a higher choir, but who in his old age fell upon 
a theory that I thought to be as vicious as it could possibly be — 
the theory, namely, that all music should be of one character, 
and that the tune should be the main thing. He said to me one 
day : ' I think a perfect hymn-tune is one to which you ought to 
be able to sing every psalm in the whole collection.' I consid- 
ered that simply monstrous, literalizing and Platonizing every- 
thing. His late books lost ground a great deal because they were 
so insuperably flat. A man might sing them to all eternity and 
not find in them anything which hooked on to his memory or 
affections, or anything that had a tendency to develop his higher 
nature. 



366 REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

" About twenty years ago Mr. Love, of Chicago — who has 
conferred great benefit upon churches and schools by his compo- 
sitions — and I were riding together from Brooklyn to Boston, and 
we discussed this question of music. He was under the influ- 
ence of Mr. Mason, and partook of his views on the subject, and 
I blew him up soundly and told him how preposterous I thought 
they were. He went home pondering what I said, and subse- 
quently, as I afterward heard, cut out from a newspaper the 
verses beginning ' My days are gliding swiftly by,' and with that 
conversation in his mind he sat down and wrote the ' Shining 
Shore ' to go with them. Whether this tune has justified my 
idea or not, it has been employed in this congregation for many 
years. Moreover, it was taken by the Brooklyn Fourteenth Regi- 
ment to the war, it was performed by their band, and whenever 
they gave anything like a serenade in the army the ' Shining 
Shore ' was called for. Since that time this tune has been played 
and sung all over the continent. How great a favorite it has 
been here you know." 

This collection was vehemently attacked by one of the reli- 
gious papers of the day in the lead, several others following, and 
was vigorously defended by Mr. Beecher in a series of articles 
in the Independent over his well-known signature, the *. So sim- 
ple a matter as bringing out a hymn-book for the use of his own 
church, and only for others so far as they chose, would hardly 
seem likely to call out so strong a protest, but it shows the posi- 
tion that he had already come to occupy in the public mind. 
With his advanced views and strong following, everything that 
he did demanded examination, must be sifted and probably 
marked dangerous. In the vigorous defence of this child of his 
heart he discourses at length upon hymns. We have room for 
only two or three extracts : 

" Hymns are the exponents of the inmost piety of the 
Church. They are crystalline tears, or blossoms of joy, or holy 
prayers, or incarnated raptures. They are the jewels which the 
Church has worn ; .the pearls, the diamonds, and precious stones 
formed into amulets more potent against sorrow and sadness than 
the most famous charms of wizard or magician. And he who 
knows the way that hymns flowed knows where the blood of 
piety ran, and can trace its veins and arteries to the very heart. 

"Oftentimes when, in the mountain country, far from noise 




Henry Ward Beecher in 1850. 



367 



368 BIOGRAPHY OF 

and interruption, we wrought upon these hymns for our vacation 
tasks, we almost forgot the living world, and were lifted up by 
noble lyrics as upon mighty wings, and went back to the days 
when Christ sang with His disciples, when the disciples sang too, 
as in our churches they have almost ceased to do. Oh ! but for 
one moment, even, to have sat transfixed and to have listened to 
the hymn that Christ sang and to the singing ! But the olive- 
trees did not hear His murmured notes more clearly than, rapt in 
imagination, we have heard them ! 

" There, too, are the hymns of St. Ambrose and many others, 
that rose up like birds in the early centuries, and have come fly- 
ing and singing all the way down to us. Their wing is untired 
yet, nor is the voice less sweet now than it was a thousand years 
ago. 

" There are Crusaders' hymns, that rolled forth their truths 
upon the Oriental air, while a thousand horses' hoofs kept time 
below and ten thousand palm-leaves whispered and kept time 
above ! Other hymns, fulfilling the promise of God that His saints 
should mount up with wings as eagles, have borne up the sorrows, 
the desires, and the aspirations of the poor, the oppressed, and 
the persecuted, of Huguenots, of Covenanters, and of Puritans, 
and winged them to the bosom of God. 

" In our own time, and in the familiar experiences of daily life 
how are hymns mossed over and vine-clad with domestic associa- 
tions ! 

" One hymn hath opened the morning in ten thousand fami- 
lies, and dear children with sweet voices have charmed the eve- 
ning in a thousand places with the utterance of another. Nor do 
I know of any steps now left on earth by which one may so soon 
rise above trouble or weariness as the verses of a hymn and the 
notes of a tune. And if the angels that Jacob saw sang when 
they appeared, then I know that the ladder which he beheld was 
but the scale of divine music let down from heaven to earth." 

We must find room for his answer to the charge of having 
left out from Watts " fifteen splendid hymns," whose first lines 
are mentioned. After accounting for five of them by showing 
that they were left out because others of Watts's versions of the 
same Psalms, and better ones, have been selected, he goes on to 

say : " Next in the list the charges that we have omitted 

Watts's hymn, ' Glory to Thee, my God, this night.' This evening 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 369 

hymn, dear to thousands of hearts, was probably written before 
Watts was born, certainly before he had written his psalms and 
hymns, by Bishop Ken, who was thirty-seven years old when 
Watts was born, and who died when Watts was but thirty-six 
years old. There is not, perhaps, another hymn in the language 
which it would require such ignorance to ascribe to Dr. Watts. 
To make the blunder full-orbed, it turns out that the hymn is not 
omitted, after all, from 'Plymouth Collection,' but may be found 
at page 416, hymn 1287. 

" The next omission from Watts charged by the is the 

hymn ' While my Redeemer's near.' We left that hymn out 
from Watts because Dr. Watts left it out himself, not thinking it 
honest, we suppose, to insert a hymn before it was written, or to 
appropriate another author's labors as his own. For this hymn 
was written by Mrs. Steele, I know not how many years after 
Watts's death. How dearly this critic must have loved Watts ! 

" We are next charged with excluding from ' Plymouth Col- 
lection ' the hymn of Watts, ' God is our Refuge and Defence.' 
Alas ! this hymn is by Montgomery, and not by Watts at all. 

" How precious Watts's hymns must be to a man who cannot 
tell a Steele or a Montgomery from a Watts ! With what grief 
must one be afflicted at the injury done to Watts by not ascrib- 
ing to him Bishop Ken's hymns ? Why did not the go on 

and mention the even more glaring omissions from Watts in the 
* Plymouth Collection,' such as ' Ye Mariners of England,' ' Drink 
to me only with thine eyes,' ' To be or not to be ' — all of which 
are left out of Watts and the ' Plymouth Collection,' and which 
should have attracted the learned attention of the critic of the 



"It is rumored that the Psalm-Book of the New School As- 
sembly is to be revised. If so, the interests of the Church re- 
quire that the editor of the should be put on the committee. 

His accuracy, his carefulness, his profound knowledge of hymns, 
and especially his intelligent admiration of Dr. Watts, cannot be 
spared in such a labor." 

In this discussion his adversaries found out, what to this day, 
we think, is not well understood, that his action, however im- 
pulsive it might appear, really sprang from very clearly defined 
principles, which could be justified whenever, wherever, and by 
whom attacked, and that, however careless he seemed, he had a 



37o 



BIOGRAPHY OF 



habit of making himself thoroughly acquainted with the mat- 
ter in hand, and was prepared to meet any antagonist. Mr. 
Beecher had great boldness and perfect confidence in his con- 
clusions, and was willing to stand alone upon them, because he 
had thought them out and settled the matter once for all. 

From the kindly manner in which he had often spoken of the 
Episcopal Church, his mother's communion, and in his account 
of the effect which the service had upon him at Stratford-on- 
Avon, it might seem that he would attempt to bring some form 
of it into use in Plymouth Church; but no movement in that 
direction was ever made, and he appears to have been well satis- 
fied with the possibilities that lay in the simple forms of his own 
order. He has several articles at different times upon a proposed 
"Congregational Liturgy," but advocates no change of method, 
only an improvement of spirit. " Our services are barren, not 
from any want of common forms of devotion, but from the want 
of common sympathy. A church has a right to the gifts of every 
one of its members, and the minister is set to disclose and develop 
them. He is not to lean upon the strong, or avail himself alone 
of the services of those already developed. It is his office to take 
hold of every individual man, and to educate him, so that he may 
bring forth the one, or five, or ten talents which are committed to 
him for the use and profit of all his brothers. A man of books, a 
man of ideas, a man of sermons, is not Christ's idea of a minister. 
' Follow me and I will make you fishers of men' A minister is a 
man of men. He is an inspirer and driller of men. . . . But a 
dead church with a liturgy on top is like a sand desert covered 
with artificial bouquets. It is bright for the moment. But it 
is fictitious and fruitless. There are no roots to the flowers. 
There is no soil for the roots. The utmost that a liturgy can do 
upon the chilly bosom of an undeveloped, untrained church is to 
cover its nakedness with a faint shadow of what they fain would 
have but cannot get. . . . 

"As to 'surpliced boys,' we have them already. The whole 
congregation is a choir, and our boys, bright and happy, unite and 
respond with the elders ; so the surplice which they wear is just that 
thing which the dear mother threw over them when they left her. 

" If we were disposed to use any liturgy, we know of no one 
which we should sooner employ than that which expressed the 
earliest religious feelings of our own mother, now in heaven. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 37 I 

The mere fact that she had used and loved it would for ever 
make it sacred to us. We never hear it pronounced by a sincere 
and earnest man without deriving profit from it ourselves ; and 
we have no doubt that others are benefited by its use. We do 
not, however, believe that its continual use as the only vehicle 
of expression of the religious feeling of the congregation would 
be as profitable, on the whole, as an extemporaneous worship. If 
we did we should use a liturgy. While, then, we decline to use it 
in public, because we think it, on the whole, less edifying than 
the usage of Congregational churches, we do it without wishing 
to detract from its intrinsic excellence, and without wounding 
the feelings of those who delight to use it." 

At this time he takes pains to contradict the report that he had 
spoken slightingly of the Episcopalian forms in saying that " he 
would as soon go a-courting with his father's old love-letters as 
to go to church and carry a book to pray out of ": 

" So far from its being true that the remark in this story was 
applied to the Episcopal or any other liturgy, it was applied to 
what are called extemporaneous prayers in Congregational and 
Presbyterian prayer-meetings. We were reprehending the prac- 
tice of praying without sincerity or real religious feeling. We 
said that when men began to lead in public prayer they should 
be simple, truthful, and strictly individual, expressing their own 
wants or feelings with child-like truthfulness. We commented 
upon the undeniable fact that men too often borrowed their 
prayers, copying the elder or deacon or minister, not to express 
real feelings, but as forms. Thus extemporaneous prayers became 
hereditary. And it was in reference to these unwritten forms of 
prayer, in our own Congregational churches, that the remark im- 
puted to us was made. It was not a fling at the Episcopal 
service. We never indulge in such remarks at the expense of 
other denominations, and never intend to do it. We regard the 
whole practice of railing at other sects or their religious usages, 
from the pulpit, as not only unchristian but discourteous and 
ungentlemanly." 

The year 1857 was one of great commercial trouble through 
the country. Many of his people were involved and became 
bankrupt. This gave him much uneasiness from his sympathy 
with them, and to some extent affected his health, which he al- 
ludes to in a letter to his brother later in the year : 



372 BIOGRAPHY OF 

"I do not think it safe for me to undertake so much work 
this winter. My head is already suffering from overwork and 
anxiety induced by commercial troubles among my people. 
God will in the end make it a greater blessing than their pros- 
perity." 

A family affliction which he felt very keenly, both in his per- 
sonal affection and in sympathy with those who were bereaved, 
added to his burden. In a letter to the Independent, July 16, 
1857, he says : 

" The writer has been called by the stroke of violence to part 
with three nephews within two weeks — two of them of one age — 
•dying, one in New Hampshire, and the others in Ohio. 

" Two sons of Dr. Talbot Bullard, of Indianapolis, Ind. — 
Henry, aged thirteen, and Frank, aged eighteen — were thrown 
with the cars over an embankment, and died the same day. 

" Nobler, truer, more gentle, and more amiable natures never 
were. Just a moment before the accident one of them said to a 
gentleman by their side : 'In a few moments we shall be at 
home.' They were indeed nearer home than they thought. 

" Henry E. B. Stowe was the eldest son of his father's family. 
On the 9th of July, while bathing in the Connecticut River, he 
was drowned. But we sorrow not as those without hope : his 
race was quickly run." 

We are not surprised, therefore, that we detect in most of the 
letters of this year a tinge of sadness accompanied with increased 
spiritual tenderness, as if he were finding the sources of consola- 
tion for himself, that he might lead others to them. 

Lenox was found to be so far from Brooklyn that it was given 
up as a summer home, and this year, 1857, he spends his vacation 
at Matteawan, on the Hudson. His first letter gives us this bit of 
characteristic description : 

" We are living in a pleasant old house, around which fruit- 
trees have grown in which birds have bred and lived unmolested 
from year to year. It is but a dozen wing-beats from the trees 
to the mountain woods. Nothing can please a meditative bird 
better than to have domestic scenes on one side and the seclusion 
of the wilderness on the other. A bird loves a kind of shy fa- 
miliarity. Here we have a garden, a door-yard, an orchard, and 
a barn grouped together ; and they on the other side have the 
young forests of scooped mountain-side. So the birds come 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 373 

down here for fun and go up there for reflection. This is their 
world ; that is their cathedral." 

" In the Mountain and the Closet " he is speaking out of his 
own experience : 

" The influences which brood upon the soul in such a covert 
as the closet are not like the coarse stimulants of earthly thought. 
The soul rises to its highest nature and meets the influences that 
rest upon it from above. What are its depths of calmness, 
what is the vision of faith, what is the rapture, the ecstasy of 
love, the closet knows more grandly than all other places of hu- 
man experience." 

It is not all sadness even in this year of the minor key. In 
August we have a long article upon " Hours of Exaltation," in 
which he gives us some of those higher experiences which were 
common to him : 

"... We are filled with the very affluence of peacefulness 
and joy. There is neither sorrow, nor want, nor madness, nor 
trouble in the wide world. The glory of the Lord, that at other 
times hangs upon the horizon like embattled clouds full gorgeous 
with the sun, on such days as we have described descends and 
fills the whole earth. The impassioned language of the psalm- 
ists and prophets, which on other days is lifted up so high above 
our imaginations that we can scarcely hear it, now comes down 
and sounds all its grandeur in our ears. The mountains do 
praise the Lord ; the trees clap their hands. The clouds are His 
chariot and bear Him through the air, leaving brightness and joy 
along their path. The birds know their King. The flowers lift 
up their hands, and with the silent tongue of perfume praise God 
with choice odors. The whole earth doth praise Thee." 

In September of this year he visits Litchfield with his father 
— the latter for the first time since he had moved to Boston — and 
writes a letter upon " An Aged Pastor's Return " : 

" A man past eighty going through the streets, to visit all the 
fathers and mothers in Israel that had been young in his ministry 
there, was a scene not a little memorable. One patriarch in his 
ninety-ninth year, when his former pastor came into the room, 
spoke not a word, but rose up and, putting his trembling arms 
around his neck, burst into tears. . . ." 

u The particular errand that brought us hither was a lecture. 
A new organ was to be bought. All Litchfield boys were per- 



3 74 BIOGRAPHY OF 

mitted to help. Our contribution was asked in the shape of a 
lecture. My part was soon done. Then the aged pastor came 
forward. A crowd of old and young gathered at the pulpit- 
stairs to greet the hand that had baptized them or had broken to 
them the bread of life. It was a scene of few words. One wo- 
man gave her name, but was not recognized in her married name. 
She then mentioned her maiden name. That touched a hidden 
spring. Both burst into tears, but spoke no words. The history 
came up instantly before both, but silently, which had occasioned 
the preaching of those sermons upon intemperance whose influ- 
ence for good will never cease." 

And now he points to one of the dangers which he has 
learned to avoid, and opens to us some of the lessons which he 
has himself learned from the experiences of this year : 

" Many troubles in life cease when we cease to nurse them, 

" Many troubles are but the strain which we endure when 
God would carry us the right way and we insist upon going the 
wrong. Troubles come to us like mire and filth, but when well 
mingled they change to flower and fruit. 

" It should be borne in mind and thought of with thankful- 
ness that although a heavy pecuniary pressure has been resting 
on the community, nothing perishes. No ships will rot, as under 
embargo ; stores will not go down ; not a wheel will rust, but 
only rest ; the railroads, whose creation has cost us so much, are 
created, and will not go back but thunder on. Not an acre will 
go again to the forest ; not a seed will rot. 

" We shall hold the substantial elements gained, losing no art, 
no science, no ideas, no habits, no skill, no industry, nothing but 
a little temporary comfort ; and for that we shall receive back 
steadiness, safety, reality, and consolation worth a thousand- 
fold." 

That there had been no diminution of the prosperity of the 
church appears from an announcement in one of the New York 
papers of the annual pew-renting, which took place January 7 of 
the following year : 

" The membership of Plymouth Church was never so large as 
at present, and the size of the congregation is undiminished. 
The building admits of an audience of about three thousand per- 
sons, and it is not an uncommon occurrence on a pleasant Sun- 
day evening for fully as great a number as this to go away from 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 375 

the church-doors, unable to get even standing-room within the 
walls." 

If the year 1857 was one of sadness, that of 1858 was one of 
rejoicing. The sowing with tears was followed by the reaping 
with joy. Never in the history of our country were revivals of 
religion so frequent, so deep and wide-spread, as in the year that 
followed the great financial disasters of 1857. The shattering of 
men's hopes of wealth, the disturbance and destruction of their 
confidence in material things, was followed by a very general 
turning to those things that endure. From a little book en- 
titled " The Revival in Plymouth Church," published anony- 
mously, from the testimony of those who were active at that 
time, and from letters and sermons besides, we get a very clear 
idea of the part which Mr. Beecher took in this great work and 
the methods he pursued. Near the close of the year preceding he 
had received a letter from a young man in New York, who de- 
scribed himself as slowly but surely sinking beneath the tempta- 
tions which he could not escape, and who implored help from the 
destruction that hung over him. He said, " Preach to me the ter- 
rors of the law, anything to arouse me from this fearful lethargy." 
Mr. Beecher read the appeal to his audience, and answered it by 
preaching on the love of God in Jesus Christ as the only remedy 
for man's sin and the only power for his salvation, and said : "If 
this remedy fails I know of no other. If love will not save you, 
fear will be of no avail." He then led the congregation in a 
most earnest and tender prayer for that young man and for the 
great multitude which he represented. 

It was by such means as this, enlisting the feeling of his audi- 
ence in specific cases, awakening and directing the sympathies 
of the church, that the work began. He disclaimed any confi- 
dence in a revival, born of mere excitement, carefully explained 
God's methods in saving men, and threw the whole responsibility 
for success upon Christians. If their hearts were filled with the 
love of God the influence would be felt with power by those 
aro,und them. 

On the last Sabbath in February he preached upon the rea- 
sonableness, usefulness, and Scriptural nature of revivals, com- 
bated objections against them, and finally brought it home to the 
conscience of his people : " Ought you not to have a revival ? " 

On the next Sabbath, at the communion season, he preached 



376 BIOGRAPHY OF 

upon the words, " For so an entrance shall be ministered unto 
you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ," holding up before his people with great 
clearness and tenderness the privileges and the infinite rewards 
of patient, Christian following and labor. The father, who 
assisted at the service which followed, expressed the feeling of 
many hearts when, in his prayer, he said : " Lord, we thank Thee 
for the opening out of Thy word this morning ; we have been 
brought very near heaven ; we see not how we can be any nearer 
till we stand within the very gates." 

On the Wednesday evening following, at the usual weekly 
lecture, he spoke to a crowded audience upon the conversion of 
the Philippian jailer. It was a service of confession of the lack 
of faith in the ever-present grace of God, of instruction con- 
cerning the spirit and methods of the apostles, and of guidance to 
any who were seeking light and peace. A prayer-meeting fol- 
lowed, at which any who desired prayers for themselves or 
others were given opportunity to make their desire known, and 
the work was begun. 

" Morning meetings were opened daily, and were attended 
by ever-increasing numbers, while so many remained afterward 
for instruction that the pastor's work was rarely over before 
eleven or twelve o'clock. He called in lieutenants of both sexes, 
who helped him in the work. No one who attended on those 
occasions can ever forget the fascinating mixture of tenderness, 
earnestness, pathos, dry humor, quick wit, and sound common 
sense that ran through all the instruction of those meetings. 
One would be told to pray; another, whose knees were almost 
worn out and whose mind was diseased with useless anxiety, 
was told in the next breath to stop praying and go to sweeping ; 
the many timid and shrinking ones were encouraged into freedom, 
while one or two, who thought that all the angels were anxiously 
awaiting the news of their conversion before the business of 
heaven could proceed, were taken down by a little quiet humor 
that cured yet did not wound ; and all alike were brought into the 
one fold. Under such influences and instructions three hundred 
and thirty-five persons united with the church this season. 

" The morning prayer-meeting has been in Plymouth Church 
emphatically a ■ love-feast,' the attractive influences being love 
to Christ, to the pastor, and to one another in full and lively 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 377 

exercise. No better description of these meetings can be given 
than that of a happy and united family gathering together, under 
the guidance of a beloved and honored father, for morning wor- 
ship. No wonder that men as they passed along the street, 
though unused to a prayer-meeting, could not resist the voice of 
song which fell on their ear daily in the sweet morning hour ; and 
no wonder that, once having entered, they should be fascinated 
by the scene which met their eye and warmed by the atmosphere 
of love which they breathed, and should return saying : ' Surely 
God is in this place, though we knew it not ; this is indeed the 
house of God, and this is none other than the gate of heaven/ 
There was no such feeling as that smiles, or even an honest 
laugh, were sinful ; smiles and tears mingled in curious proxim- 
ity, without any attempt at restraint ; in short, everything was 
natural. 

" At the close of a meeting, when, owing to the quaintness of 
speech of some of the brethren, especially the newly-awakened 
ones, in the relation of their varied experiences, we had laughed 
and cried alternately, the one as heartily as the other, Mr. 
Beecher said : ' I call you to witness whether this has not been a 
good meeting, whether there has not been a tender spirit among 
us, and whether the influence of the Holy Ghost has not been 
here ? I say this because, as you know, many persons entertain 
the opinion that laughing is quite inexpedient on such occasions 
as these and a sure means of grieving away the Spirit. Bear 
this meeting in mind, and let it be your answer to the charge 
of irreverence whenever it may be brought against us on this 
score.' " 

He gave one of his own experiences : 

"You know that my usual frame of mind is hopefulness. 
I am apt to look at the bright side of things and take cheerful 
views of life. On this very account an occasional experience of 
sadness is an inexpressible luxury to me. Last night, I know not 
why, but I could not sleep for some hours. I lay restlessly, turn- 
ing from side to side, till this morning between one and two. 
No sooner was I asleep than it seemed to me I was in an Episco- 
pal church, robed in black, where a clergyman was celebrating 
the Lent service. By and by he ascended the pulpit and began 
to speak. There was no eloquence in his language, nor anything 
particularly striking in his mode of dealing with his subject, but 



378 BIOGRAPHY OF 

his heart was evidently in it. He was setting forth in simple lan- 
guage the sufferings of Jesus, and as I listened there seemed to 
rise up before me a vivid conception of the Saviour in His last 
agony on Calvary. I gazed till the tears gushed from my eyes, 
and I awoke to find my pillow soaking wet. I composed myself 
again to sleep, and my imagination took up the stitch just where 
I had dropped it, and knitted on. I beheld the same vision, 
and again the tears flowed. I gazed and wept until it seemed 
to me as if my very soul would dissolve and the fountain of 
tears be itself exhausted. Again I awoke, and, again falling 
asleep, the vision was for the third time repeated, and I seemed 
to weep my very life away. I know not when I had before 
such a sweet, rich experience of the love of my Saviour ; and 
when I awoke finally this morning, it was with a tenderness of 
soul I cannot well describe. I was thankful I did not sleep 
sooner, and that when I did sleep I made such 'good use of 
my time." 

Opportunity was given at these meetings to any who wished 
to ask the brethren to pray for themselves or for others, and was 
largely used. A little before the close of the meeting Mr. 
Beecher would rise, and, taking the slips of paper that covered 
his table, read from them aloud. After reading these he would 
ask, " Are there any here who desire to make requests on behalf 
of their friends ? " And then when these had all been made he 
would say, " Are there any who desire to ask on their own ac- 
count ? " Then having caught the eye of each as they arose, and 
acknowledged the request by a slight inclination of the head, in 
token of recognition, until they ceased rising, " in a low, soft tone 
would come the words, ' Let us unite in prayer,' and instantly 
every head was bowed. The prayers which followed these scenes 
were the most precious opportunities of communion with the Lord 
Jesus Christ which we were ever permitted to enjoy. We believe 
that he who uttered them was taught of the Holy Ghost, and that 
he spake as the Spirit gave him utterance. There was an exube- 
rance of faith and love in these utterances not usually found in 
prayer ; a gladness on the part of the speaker, and a recognized 
consciousness of gladness on the part of Christ. They were the 
breathings of love into a loving ear." "We always concluded 
with a hymn, for Mr. Beecher was wont to say that he liked to 
send us away with a full tide of song, and for a long time our 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 379 

choice for concluding hymns lay between 'Shining Shore ' and 
' Homeward Bound.' " 

March 27, 1858, Mr. Beecher gave a twenty-minute ad- 
dress in Burton's old theatre in Chambers Street at the noon 
prayer-meeting. " I wish to leave the impression that the matter 
of salvation is a matter between your own heart and the Lord 
Jesus Christ ; that there is between you a sympathy so plain 
that there is no need of any interference. You may become a 
Christian ?ww, and go home to your household and be enabled to 
ask a blessing at your table to-day." 

Letters are frequent this year upon subjects like this, " Trust 
in God ": 

" We ought not to forget that an affectionate, confiding, tender 
faith, habitually exercised, would save us half the annoyances of 
life, for it would lift us above the reach of them. If an eagle 
were to fly low along the ground every man might aim a dart at 
it ; but when it soars into the clouds it is above every arrow's 
reach. And they that trust in God ' shall mount up with wings 
as eagles ; they shall run and not be weary ; they shall walk and 
not faint.'" 

About this time he answers a criticism that appeared in sev- 
eral papers upon the extravagant income of Plymouth Church : 

" It is easy to stand off and rail. Will any one suggest a plan 
by which five thousand men can be put into a church that can 
hold only three thousand ? 

' The poor should be held in lively remembrance. But ought 
we to provide for the poor in a way that shall punish those who 
are not poor ? . . . 

" In closing we 'will only say that from the beginning no 
church ever more conscientiously endeavored to give the Gospel 
to all classes, rich and poor, resident or strangers. For ten years 
the members of this society have cheerfully submitted to an in- 
convenience, for the sake of the poor and of strangers, such as 
has rarely had a parallel. Gentlemen have paid hundreds of 
dollars for pews which were, with the exception of a single Sab- 
bath in the year, more or less filled with the poor. 

" Every Sabbath day families who have paid hundreds of dol- 
lars for a pew, coming to church, find it pre-occupied by the poor 
and the stranger, and it is a rare exception that in such cases 
there is any irritation. 



380 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" Generally the owner, distributing his family as best he can, 
takes a seat in the aisle or stands in the entry. And this is not 
an occasional thing. It is the regular experience of the congre- 
gation, year after year." 

The year 1859 opens with some very characteristic letters 
from Mr. Beecher. He had been charged with having held the 
doctrine of total depravity up to ridicule in a lecture which 
he delivered in Boston. This brings from him a letter, two or 
three passages of which we here transcribe : 

" But although we did not employ the phrase total depravity 
in any opprobrious sense at the time mentioned, we do not hesi- 
tate to say that we regard it as one of the most unfortunate and 
misleading terms that ever afflicted theology. . . . 

" On the other hand, we do believe, with continual sorrow of 
heart and daily overflowing evidence, in the deep sinfulness of 
universal man. . . . We heartily hate the phrase total depravity, 
and never feel inclined to use it except when reading the ethics 
of or the religious editorials of ." 

He was shortly after this attacked for lecturing in a " Frater- 
nity Course " in the same city. This calls out a long answer 
upon " Working with Errorists," in which he says : 

" I have long ago been convinced that it was better to love 
men than to hate them, that one would be more likely to convince 
them of wrong belief by showing a cordial sympathy with their 
welfare than by nipping and pinching them with logic. And 
although I do not disdain but honor philosophy applied to re- 
ligion, I think that the world just now needs the Christian heart 
more than anything else. And even' if the only and greatest 
question were the propagation of the right theology, I am confi- 
dent that right speculative views will grow up faster and firmer 
in the summer of true Christian loving than in the rigorous 
winter of solid, congealed orthodoxy or the blustering March of 
controversy. . . . 

" If tears could wash away from Mr. Parker's eyes the hin- 
drances, that he might behold Christ as I behold and adore Him, 
I would shed them without reserve. If prayers could bring 
to him this vision of glory, beyond sight of philosophy, I would 
for him besiege the audience-chamber of heaven with an end- 
less procession of prayers, until another voice, sounding forth 
from another light brighter than the noonday sun, should cast 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 38 1 

down another blinded man, to be lifted up an apostle with in- 
spired vision. 

" But since I may not hope so to prevail, I at least will carry 
him in my heart ; I will cordially work with him when I can, and 
be heartily sorry when I cannot. 

" While we yet write word comes that Mr. Parker, broken 
down by over-labor, seeks rest and restoration in a warmer cli- 
mate. Should these lines reach his eyes let him know that one 
heart at least remembers his fidelity to man in great public exi- 
gencies, when so many swerved of whom we had a right to 
expect better things. God shield him from the ocean, the storm, 
the pestilence, and heal him of lurking disease ! And there shall 
be one Christian who will daily speak his name to the heart of 
God in earnest prayer, that with health of body he may receive 
upon his soul the greatest gift of God — faith in Jesus Christ as 
the Divine Saviour of the world." 

Another incident calls forth a similar response : 

" At the recent celebration of Tom Paine's birthday at Cin- 
cinnati the infidels present toasted : ' The heretic clergy, Parker, 
Emerson, Conway, Chapin, Beecher, and all who love man above 
all creeds, and sects, and rituals, and observances, who regard man 
as the highest and holiest and most sacred of all in the uni- 
verse — may their motto be : Ever onward, greater freedom, and 
clearer light.' ' Having disclaimed any distinction as one who 
loves man more than creeds, since this is " true of all Chris- 
tians when they are in their most Christian disposition," and 
having accepted their motto as being in line with sundry pas- 
sages of Scripture, he gives his true and honest feeling towards 
them in these words : 

" Let no man think that we despise the sympathy and well- 
wishing of a convention of infidels. We thank them for their 
kind feelings. Like our Master, we had rather discourse with 
publicans and sinners than dine with the most select and eminent 
Pharisee. But we love a true Christian better than either. 
But, infidel or Pharisee, all need the grace of God, and all, 
by repentance of sin and faith in Christ, the Saviour of sinners, 
may yet meet in heaven. 

" Gentlemen of the Cincinnati convention of infidels ! we 
should be ashamed to be less kind and courteous than you 



3&2 BIO G RA PHY OF 

have been, and in concluding we take leave of you kindly, say- 
ing, in the words of Inspired Writ : 

" 4 Now may the God of peace, that brought again from the 
dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through 
the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in 
every good work to do His will, working in you that which is 
well pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ. To whom be 
glory for ever and ever.' * " 

The setting up of a new organ in Plymouth Church this win- 
ter is thus duly announced : 

" The organ long expected has arrived, been unpacked, set 
up, and glorified over. It has piped, fluted, trumpeted, brayed, 
thundered. It has played so loud that everybody was deafened, 
and so softly that nobody could hear." 

After speaking of the characteristics of the many organists 
who have tried it, and of one who was an especially brilliant 
player, he says : " But he was not a Christian man, and the organ 
was not to him a Christian instrument, but simply a grand Gothic 
instrument, to be studied just as a mere Protestant would study a 
cathedral, in the mere spirit of architecture and not at all in sym- 
pathy with its religious signification or uses. And before long 
he went abroad to perfect himself in his musical studies, but 
not till a most ludicrous event befell him. On a Christmas day 
a great performance was to be given. The church was full ; all 
were musically expectant. It had been given out that something 
might be expected. And surely something was had a little more 
than was expected. For when every stop was drawn, that the 
opening might be with a grand choral effect, the down-pressing of 
his hands brought forth not only the full expected chord, but also 
a cat that by some strange chance had got into the organ. She 
went up over the top as if gunpowder had helped her. Down 
she plunged into the choir, to the track around the front bulwark 
of the gallery, until opposite the pulpit, when she dashed down 
one of the supporting columns, made for the broad aisle, when a 
little dog joined in -the affray, and both went down toward the 
street-door at an astonishing pace. Our organist, who, on the 
first appearance of this element in his piece, snatched back his 
hands, had forgotten to relax his muscles, and was to be seen 
following the cat with his eyes, with his head turned, while his 
astonished hands stood straight out before him, rigid as marble! " 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 38^ 

In the spring of this year he purchased a farm in Peekskill, 
and explains his object as follows : 

" I knew that the place was good for grass, for grain, and for 
fruits, of all which I talked a good deal during the preliminary 
approaches to a purchase, but for which I cared about as much 
as I should whether the inside of my boots were red or yellow. 

"If the thing mUst be told— and I mention it to you, Mr. 
Bonner, confidentially— it was the remarkable aptitude of the 
place for eye-crops that caught my fancy. It was not so much 
what grew upon the place, as what you could see off from it, 
that won me. It is a great stand for the eye. If a man can 
get rich by looking, I am on the royal road to wealth. And, 
indeed, it is true wealth that the eye gets, and the ear and all 
the finer senses ; riches that cannot be hoarded or squandered ; 
that all may have in common ; that come without meanness 
and abide without corrupting. So long as it remains true that 
the heavens declare the glory of God, and the earth His handi- 
work, so long will men find both heart-wealth and strength by 
a reverent admiration of the one and a sympathetic familiarity 
with the other." 

In a letter to his daughter he describes the new home : 

"... Farm — I wrote so far at home, but being interrupted 
have brought it up to the green hills. You will be quite 
ashamed to think that Matteawan ever seemed beautiful to you 
when you shall have seen this place. It has no wild or romantic 
features, but it is full of soft, nice, beautiful views* No barren 
fields are seen, no brown pasture-lands, no rugged hills — the very 
mountains in the horizon are carved into round and graceful 
shapes. The near hills are round, gentle, smooth, and verduous 
to the very top. Only one summit is rugged and wild, and we 
keep that in the distant foreground as a contrast to all the other 
graceful shapes. The river in the distance is like a lake, except 
the fleets of sloops and schooners give it a sense of navigation. 
From the top hill of the farm you can see almost as wide a pros- 
pect as from Bald Mountain in Salisbury — on the north and east, 
wild, mountainous, solitary ; but all the rest beautiful and culti- 
vated, with the Hudson rolling along the west. I have traced 
a rude diagram* on the opposite page, but it will be only just 

* The Publishers regret that the diagram could not be given. 



384 BIOGRAPHY OF 

better than nothing, though you must confess that it is exceed- 
ingly well drawn for me ! 

"... I heard from H yesterday. He is well and lively, 

and wrote me quite a sprightly and witty letter. W is round, 

rosy, curly, and loving as usual. B , the rogue, is fairly recov- 
ering from a double charge of scarlet-fever and whooping-cough, 
and is becoming most healthfully saucy." 

Early in the autumn they returned from the country and be- 
gan life again in the city. We give copies of several letters 
written to his daughter : 

" Brooklyn, Sept. 4, 1859. 

"... In the beginning let me say, my dear child, that I 
heartily approve of all that you have done. I am not a super- 
stitious observer of the Sabbath, nor do I hold to the rigor either 
of the Jewish or the Puritan Sabbath. But I do believe that one- 
seventh part of our time was originally appointed for rest, for 
home-society, and for religious culture. . . . 

" When I was myself in Paris I acted just as I do in Brook- 
lyn. I took no more liberties, and was quite as observant of my 
home proprieties. And I must say that I do not relish the idea of 
our young countrymen going to Europe to learn how to get rid 
of religious habits. Foreign travel should improve our manners, 
increase our information, enlarge our experience of men, enrich 
our imagination, cultivate our tastes, but not enervate our con- 
science. . . . 

" Everything is going well at the farm. I have bought a yoke 
of cattle, white with mottled necks and red heads ; also two 
Ayrshire calves, and a little bull calf of the same breed. Your 
mother is driving away at her cheeses in the most housewifely 
style. She has already made, eaten, and given away two or three, 
and she has four or five on hand, good large ones, which are to 
grow old for city use. Already I imagine myself a nimble little 
maggot making the cheese fly. The pet ponies do bravely, the 
pigs are fat and flourishing, the chickens comely, and the ducks 
noisy but drawing very near to doom and dinner. 

" I would not advise you to use wine unless you are weak and 
it is recommended by judicious advisers for real reasons of 
health ; and then I should take it frankly and without hesitation. 
But while you do not use it, you are not bound to take it on any 
occasion for others' sake. If the occasion comes, call for a glass 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 385 

of water and calmly lift that to your lips. But more of this by 
and by. I have no objection to your learning to dance as a part 
of physical education." 

The home life in Brooklyn ran undisturbed through the 
autumn, until, early in i860, a serious accident befell Mrs. 
Beecher, which Mr. Beecher describes in the following letter : 

"February ii, i860. 
" Mv dear Child H : 

" I suppose you will not scold me if I relieve your mother of 
letter- writing this steamer ; it is, I think, the first time she has 
missed. But she is too lame to write to-day, having had an acci- 
dent that ought to have killed her, and that would have killed 
anybody else. And that your fears may not magnify the matter, I 
shall go back and describe it all to you. 

" On Wednesday last, February 8, she took the horse and 

chaise (a two-wheeled chaise, which we have bought of Mr. M ), 

and started to go to New York and meet and bring me home 
from the New Haven depot. Eliza and Bertie were taken in, 
the former to go over to the Hudson River Railroad for milk, 
and Bertie for the ride. The horse was spirited and soon got 
under way beyond control, but did not run till, turning into 
Hicks Street from Orange, she dashed off like lightning, ran to 
Fulton Street and right across it, up on to the pavement and 
headlong on to the Brooklyn Bank steps. The carriage was 
broken and turned over, and all, of course, heaped up together — 
horse, chaise, and people. Men sprang to the horse, held and 
detached her ; others succored the party. Bertie had a smart 
thump on his right eye, or above it, which has done him no harm, 
and he has not been kept in from his play, though made a little 
homelier than he was before. Eliza was thrown against the stone 
and a smart slit cut in her head, which bled profusely, and though 
she has kept her bed by the doctor's orders, she expects to be 
about to-day. Your mother, as usual, took everybody's share on 
herself. She was shot out apparently head-first, and fell upon 
the right side of her head, neck, and shoulder, bruising her, but 
breaking nothing. She was insensible when taken into the drug- 
store close by. I know not how H was notified so soon, but he 

seems to have been on the spot within five minutes, and mani- 
fested as much self-possession and decisive wisdom as would 
have done credit to a much older head. He gave orders to have 



386 BIOGRAPHY OF 

his mother taken home, sent for Dr. Adams to come to the drug- 
store, sent another messenger to the stableman to look after the 
carriage and horse (who, confound her homely self ! was but little 
hurt), and then took a hack to meet me at the New Haven depot 
and bring me home. 

" I reached the house very nearly as soon as your mother did. 

Found Mrs. E B , Mrs. L , Mrs. B , Mrs. E , 

and one or two strange ladies present, the doctor, a policeman 
or two, and scores of people running to and fro ; yet, in the 
main, there was order and good sense. 

" . . . The doctors regard her as out of danger, but she will 
be a sufferer for a week or more. Everything is going on regu- 
larly in the house, except that I am at home all the time, which 
is very irregular in my habits. 

"... And so when you read this you must remember that 
though it seems to you as if it had just happened, it will have 
been all past, and your mother doubtless, while you read, will be 
marching forth in full authority. Everybody who saw the scene 
speaks in admiration of her courage and skill. She guided the 
horse to the last, though she could not control her, and was 
game to the end. But that we should all expect. Nor does her 
courage flinch yet. Some one said to her yesterday : ' Well, I 
suppose you will never drive that horse again.' ' Yes, I shall 
too,' said she ; and she shall. We are very grateful for her safety 
and merciful deliverance, and although she will suffer from 
twinges, yet, as there are no internal injuries, no bones fractured, 
it is only a matter of patience. . . . Slept very well and has the 
beginning of an appetite, although I am constrained to say that 
when I mentioned the little luxury of gruel as something appe- 
tizing and excellent for her, she turned up her nose (I could not 
be mistaken) at the suggestion, so that she is evidently not quite 
settled yet in her mind. She can walk slowly, takes her bath, 
submits to packs, and has refreshed herself once or twice with a 
hand-glass, looking at the recent improvements about her coun- 
tenance. 

"... Love to all. I shall keep you faithfully apprised of 
her health, and you need not fear that anything is a bit worse 
than I say. I shall tell the truth. Good-by. 

" May God have you in His care ! 

"Your affectionate father, H. W. Beecher." 



RE V. HENR Y WA RD BEECHER. 387 

" February 14. 



My dear H- 



" Your aunt has told you of your mother, and little is to be 
added on that score. ... I wish you would take all your gauze 
paper and send it to Cardinal Antonelli, or the pope, or the 
— that is, burn it up, tear it up, crumple it, throw it away, do 
anything with it except sending it to me. Go forth and search 
and buy some that is respectable, for I wow a wow that I will vex 
my eyes no more with such intolerable stuff. I feel as though I 
could say a little more with great comfort to myself, but, as I 
must receive several letters before this reaches you and reforms 
your writing materials, I reserve a stock of wrath for those 
several occasions. 

" Wednesday, Feb. 15. — Your mother this morning is gene- 
rally better, though suffering from cramps. She is now lying in 

a pack. Mrs. F has been as good as an angel, and a great 

deal more useful. Indeed, I do not think much of angels, un- 
less they have a good serviceable body on. Of course Auntie 

B is on hand kindly and constantly. Everybody is kind. 

Mrs. G has spent four days here, two in the parlors to re- 
ceive company, etc., and two with your mother. Mrs. L 

has been incessantly here, and has both watched, waited, and run 
for watchers and nurses without tire or fatigue We had a meet- 
ing on Monday night for new church. The action of the trus- 
tees was confirmed, and they were requested to go ahead im- 
mediately and raise the necessary funds, and as soon as $100,000 
were secured to proceed to lay the foundations. I do not re- 
gard the enterprise as quite sure yet, though looking favorably. 
Give my love to the pope. I am sorry for his situation. If he 
only sat under my preaching how much his eyes might be 
opened ! As it is, if he chooses to write to me in regard to any 
of his little difficulties, I hope he will allow no delicacy to re- 
strain him. I will do the best I can for him. Ditto Antonelli 

I am now the holder of your room. There nap I, and there 
sleep I, and seldom either without a faint shadow of a rosy- 
cheeked, Minerva-eyed girl that whilom tenanted it. I have re- 
moved the boys, W and B , into the room next it, for- 
merly H 's, while he holds the front large room, now pink- 
papered and famously carpeted and furnished. Eliza is quite 
well and trots about the house with a diligence that shows how 



388 BIOGRAPHY OF 

wholesome it is for an Irishwoman to have her head broke. I 
have promised her, whenever she is sick, to give her a granite- 
steps course, instead of water, as being much better adapted to 
her wants and nationality. Give my love to all the great Ameri- 
can family. . . . Remember that paper, that paper, THAT 
PAPER ! 

" Your loving and longing father, 

" H. W. B." 

" Good-by, old fellow. Give my love to Hattie, and tell her 
that her father hasn't forgotten her," were the first words of Mr. 
Beecher to me that I remember. I had been introduced to him 
the evening before, but he had just returned from a lecturing 
tour, tired and sleepy, and if he said anything brilliant it has en- 
tirely escaped my memory. I was going, in company with Mrs. 
Stowe's son, to take a pedestrian tour in Europe. We expected, 
in time, to join her party, who were then on the Continent, and 
were busy getting ready to go on board ship that day. It was a 
hearty send off to one who was comparatively a stranger, that 
was very characteristic of the man. 

Of course I remembered the message and gave it faithfully; 
and after several months' acquaintance, travelling in Switzerland 
and Italy, made an addition of the same in kind on my own ac- 
count, which being accepted and reciprocated, we were married 
September 25, 1861. 

"The innumerable friends of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher 
would hardly forgive us if we were to omit mentioning the pleas- 
ing incident that occurred at his country residence at Peekskill 
last week. On Wednesday morning, after the dew was dry, Mr. 
Beecher chose a spot under the shadows of the trees near his 
garden, where, in the presence of a fit circle of friends and neigh- 
bors, he gave away his only daughter in a novel ceremony of 
marriage. The beauty of the day and the beauty of the cere- 
mony together rendered the scene singularly charming, tender, 
and impressive." 

Of his method of making himself acquainted with the peculiar 
features of the villages in which he lectured, and his pleasant 
words concerning the people he met, the following letter is a 
good illustration : 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 389 

"My dear Doctor : 

" I sent you a scrap from the goodly town of Norwich, N. Y., 
in which I have most pleasantly spent a portion of three days, 
and would fain have added as many more. It is one of the many 
towns in this Chenango Valley of which Dr. Dwight said that 
the time would come when men of wealth would leave the sea- 
board cities and retire to it as a place of rare repose. 

" The great hammer manufactory of the New World is also 
located here. What hardware man has not seen David Maydole's 
name? Many of the best improvements in the hammer have 
sprung from his ingenious skill. But there is room for improve- 
ment still. Thus our hammers have the power of hiding them- 
selves. 

" After investigating many cases it becomes plain that hammers 
have a power of locomotion, and that when we are asleep they 
crawl off. We have never seen them actually move, but we have 
almost. We have found them on the ground or floor, and they 
were probably on their way somewhere when we surprised them, 
and then, like many insects, they feigned dead. . . . We should 
be glad to listen every night to as sweet music as that which rose 
up before our window in Hamilton and in Norwich." 

As a complement to the above an experience in not lecturing 
is here given in full : 

" St. Louis, , 1859. 

" Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Brooklyn : 

" Dear Sir : On behalf of the Mercantile Library Associa- 
tion of this city, it is my pleasant duty to address you. We are 
now endeavoring to form the lecture programme for our asso- 
ciation for the coming season, and we wish to do so as early as 
possible. Fully appreciating your well-known reputation as a 
lecturer and an orator, we should be pleased to make an engage- 
ment with you for two or three lectures the coming fall and 
winter. If you can serve us, will you be so kind as to give us 
your terms, lime, and subject as soon as possible ? 

" As our Association may not be well known to you, permit 
me to say one word in regard to it. We think that there is no 
library association in this country that is in a more prosperous 
condition than ours. It has some eighteen hundred members, 
and is rapidly increasing. Its members are merchants, clerks, 



390 BIOGRAPHY OF 

and members from the several professions. As a matter of 
course these members come from all parts of our country, and 
naturally entertain a variety of views, both as to politics and re- 
ligion. Hence it becomes our Association to be very careful to 
eschew all matters pertaining to either of these subjects in its 
lectures. Should you be so kind as to favor us with a course of 
lectures — and we sincerely hope you will do so — you will please 
bear the above facts in mind. Hoping to hear from you at your 
earliest convenience, I remain, Yours truly, 

"R. H. D , 

" Chairman Lecture Committee, M. L. A." 

They heard from him at once as requested, and this was the 
answer : 

mr. beecher's reply. 

"Brooklyn, , 1859. 

" Dear Sir : I have received your letter politely inviting me 
to give one or more lectures before the St. Louis Mercantile Li- 
brary Association next fall or winter. But you ask, in conse- 
quence of the diversity of opinions among your members, that I 
should, if I accepted your invitation, ' eschew all matters pertain- 
ing . to politics and religion' I am too much of a patriot to 
eschew the one, and too good a Christian to neglect the other. 
Indeed, the only motive that I have for lecturing at all is the 
hope that I may make better citizens and better Christians of 
my fellow-men. And it seems to me that a course of lectures 
from which have been strained out ' all matters pertaining to 
politics and religion,' must afford but a very meagre diet to the 
young people of St. Louis. 

" Nor can I imagine why you should, under the circumstances, 
have wished me to visit you. If I have ever been of any service 
to my fellow-men, it has been because I never would eschew any 
topic which I thought it needful for them to hear. Nor have I 
ever allowed myself to stand on any platform where I could not 
follow my own judgment as to what should be said with the most 
unlimited freedom. And it is too late in my life for me to yield 
up my sense of self-respect and come under a censorship. 

" I hope I have not taken seriously a matter which, perhaps, 
you meant only as a pleasant jest. For, on reading your letter 
again, I hardly repress the conviction that you deemed it a 



i 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 39 1 

pleasant jest to ask me to come all the way to St. Louis to give 
lectures, under an implied agreement that I should ' eschew all 
matters pertaining to politics and religion ! ' " 

When the title of Doctor of Divinity was offered him he de- 
clined it, as follows : 

" Peekskill, August 21, i860. 

" To President and Board of Trustees of A?nherst College : 

" Gentlemen : I have been duly notified that at the last 
meeting of the Board of Trustees the title of D.D. was conferred 
upon me. It would certainly give me pleasure should any re- 
spectable institution bear such a testimony of good will, but that 
Amherst College, my own mother, should so kindly remember a 
son is a peculiar gratification. But all the use of such a title 
ends with the public expression. If the wish to confer it be ac- 
cepted, for the rest it would be but an encumbrance and furnish 
an address by no means agreeable to my taste. I greatly prefer 
the simplicity of that name which my mother uttered over me in 
the holy hour of infant consecration and baptism. 

" May I be permitted, without seeming to undervalue your 
kindness or disesteeming the honor meant, to return it to your 
hands, that I may to the end of my life be, as thus far I have 
been, simply Henry Ward Beecher." 

One of the peculiar features of Mr. Beecher's work in those 
days of 1861-63 was the revival interest that continued, with vari- 
ations of intensity, it is true, but with no substantial interruption, 
for years. The revival of 1858 had not entirely ceased at that 
time, and although those days of war, especially since he gave 
himself so intensely to public, matters, would naturally be regarded 
as unfavorable to any marked religious interest, yet it continued 
notwithstanding, as is shown by the numbers that constantly 
sought admission to the church upon profession of faith. This 
was owing, we doubt not, to the perfect conviction of Mr. Beech- 
er that the whole work of that time was the Lord's, and to his 
entering upon it with such consecration that he was continually 
shielded and refreshed by experiences of the divine presence. 
This gave a deep practical spirituality to his preaching, which 
was appropriated and reflected by his church, making the Gospel 
attractive, in those days of trouble, as never before. Men turned 
to the refuge which they saw he had found, and which, with 



392 BIOGRAPHY OF 

deepest sympathy and with abundant hopefulness, he was point- 
ing out to them. He himself says : " It is a mistake to suppose 
that the preoccupation of the public mind with the war, and the 
great excitements which are fed by the ever-changing rumors 
and news, are unfavorable to the work of a true minister of the 
Gospel." 

The continued ingathering into Plymouth Church during all 
those years of the war was something almost phenomenal. One 
marked occasion, the May communion of 1862, was described in 
a newspaper of that day : " Every part of the house was densely 
packed. The platform and desk were decorated with vases of 
flowers, while banks of azaleas, magnolias, carnations, fuchsias, 
white lilies, roses, and other plants in blossom reached from the 
pulpit floor to the orchestra. After the usual exercises of sing- 
ing, reading, and prayer, Mr. Beecher read a list of about eighty 
names of persons who were to unite with the church. Many of 
them were members of the Sabbath-schools and Bible-classes. 
Some were persons of middle age ; a few were persons of ad- 
vanced years. After a brief address Mr. Beecher read the 
articles of faith, to which the parties gave their assent. The or- 
dinance of baptism was then administered to those who had 
never before received it ; after which the members of the church 
arose and received the new members into full and cordial com- 
munion. Mr. Beecher took his text from John x. 3, 4. There 
had been provided memorial bouquets for each new communi- 
cant, which were distributed at the close of the services." 

These floral decorations may almost be said to have been 
introduced by Plymouth Church, and were justified by Mr. Beech- 
er upon the highest moral and religious grounds. He says of 
" Flowers in Church " : 

" They are simply the signs of gladness. They are offerings 
of joyful hearts to God. 

" Flowers are not of man. They are divine. Man can, by 
culture, develop all that God has hidden in them, but can add 
nothing to them,"nor can he invent or build them. 

" God has made flowers for everybody. They are next in 
abundance to the great elements — air, light, water. The poorest 
man has a roadside flower-garden. No mission-church is so poor 
that it cannot afford wild flowers upon the altar and a few as- 
sorted leaves in the windows. How beautifully would woman's 



REV. HENRY WARD B EEC HER. 393 

hand light up the dreary plaster wall and frigid seats of many 
a church room, if permitted to garnish them with these field- 
thoughts of God ! 

" The effect upon children is well worth our thought. To 
teach a child to love flowers is to give him riches that no bank- 
ruptcy can reach. This is the wisdom of finding our pleasures, 
not in conventional arrangements, but in sympathy with nature, 
which never is confiscated, or goes out of fashion, or becomes old 
and exhausted. There is a new heaven and a new earth every 
day, as if suggesting that grand and final event of prophecy. 

" The use of flowers on social and religious occasions soon 
gives to them meanings which they had not to us before. We 
read nature more thoughtfully and lovingly. 

" Weeds change to flowers. The moment a plant inspires in- 
telligent emotion in us it ceases to be a weed and becomes a 
flower. The natural world is not any longer godless or com- 
mercial and mechanical. It has a moral power. 

" At first many will shrink at seeing flowers upon the speak- 
er's desk or on the pulpit. But why ? Is the place too holy ? 
But is it holier than God? And are not flowers His peculiar 
workmanship ? If God deemed it suitable to His dignity and 
glory to occupy His mind with making and preserving such 
innumerable flowers, are we wise in disdaining them or consid- 
ering the place too sacred for God's favorites? Do men reflect 
that God has been pleased to name Himself from flowers ? 
4 1 am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley.' " 

In line with this are his views upon " Christian Liberty in the 
Use of the Beautiful " : 

" I cannot but think Christian men have not only a right of 
enjoyment in the beautiful, but a duty, in some measure, of pro- 
ducing it, or propagating it, or diffusing it abroad through the 
community. 

" But in all your labors for the beautiful, remember that its 
mission is not of corruption, nor of pride, nor of selfishness, but 
of benevolence ! And as God hath created beauty, not for a few, 
but hath furnished it for the whole earth, multiplying it until, like 
drops of water and particles of air, it abounds for every living 
thing, and in measure far transcending human want, until the 
world is a running-over cup, so let thine heart understand both 
the glory of God's beauty and the generosity of its distribution. 



394 BIOGRAPHY OF 

So living, life shall be a glory, and death a passing from glory to 
glory." 

If we have supposed that his love for nature was intuitive or 
came to its fulness without effort or study, the following letter 
will correct that impression : 

" We are performing not alone a work of love in commending 
Ruskin, but paying a small part of a debt that can never be dis- 
charged. We are more indebted to him for the blessings of 
sight than to all other men. We were, in respect to nature, of the 
number of those who, having eyes, saw not; and ears, heard not. 
He taught us what to see and how to see. Thousands of golden 
hours and materials both for self-enjoyment and the instruction 
of others, enough to fill up our whole life, we owe to the spirit 
excited in us by the reading of Ruskin's early works. 

" The sky, the earth, and the waters are no longer what they 
were to us. 

"We have learned a language and come to a sympathy in 
them more through the instrumentality of Ruskin's works than 
by all other instrumentalities on earth, excepting always the 
nature which my mother gave me — sainted be her name ! " 

We have again come to the point, 1863, which we once before 
reached in this biography, but this time upon entirely different 
lines. In our first examination, for the sake of unity of impres- 
sion, we confined ourselves to the events of the great anti-slavery 
conflict. In this which we have just completed we have sketch- 
ed the outline of other labors and the events of his home life 
during this period. No one, we suspect, reading the first record, 
the record of strife and battle, would conceive it possible that 
a life so full of all manner of peaceful pursuits and home labors 
was being lived ; nor, on the other hand, would any one going 
over his work of preaching, lecturing, writing helpful Star articles 
upon all manner of common subjects, imagine that he had the 
time or the spirit for the former work. But, in fact, in his 
case they were each the necessary complement of the other. 

We have seen how, at the West in the midst of continued re- 
vival efforts, he took up the study of landscape-gardening as an 
alterative. This was an illustration of his habit through life. 
In the midst of the most exciting events he would escape and go 
apart from them all, if possible, to some point where he could 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 



395 



look out upon the landscape or up to the clear heavens. Such 
places at such times seemed to become Mountains of Transfigura- 
tion, where he would meet the Master and be refreshed by His 
presence, and whence returning he would bring back a store of 
beautiful experiences that enabled him to give cheer and inspira- 
tion to his fellow-toilers, who had not, perhaps, noted his absence 
from their side. Or he would escape to some quiet nook and 
hold converse with birds and flowers, delight himself in quaint 
and pleasant fancies, look at life from a new standpoint, until he 
was able again to take up the burden without weariness ; or he 
would sit down with his boxes of seeds or catalogues of plants, 
and lose himself in their imagined growth and beauty ; or, draw- 
ing from his pocket some one of the precious stones he always 
carried with him, gather rest and inspiration as he watched its 
changing hues. 

In this way he was enabled to carry on the most various and 
exhaustive labors, and at the same time to preserve that mental 
health and good cheer for which he was remarkable. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

Visit to England in 1863 — The Need of Rest— Condition of Affairs at 
Home— Arrival at Liverpool — Refusal to Speak — Visit to the Continent 
— Reception by the King of Belgium — Civil War Discussed — News of 
Victories — Return to England. 

THE spring of 1863 found Mr. Beecher thoroughly exhaust- 
ed and greatly in need of both mental and physical rest. 
The past twelve years had been a season of unremitting 
care and toil. In addition to the regular duties of his new and 
growing church, and the active revival work carried on at this 
period, which were quite enough to task the energies of any one 
less fortunately endowed with mental and vital energy, he had 
taken a very active part in the anti-slavery agitation, and from the 
pulpit, the lecture platform, and the columns of the Independent 
kept up a constant fire upon this national evil. In 1856, as we 
have seen, he had thrown himself heart and soul into the Fremont 
campaign, well-nigh destroying his health. From i860 he had 
been laboring, without rest, to uphold the government, to rouse 
and maintain the patriotic confidence of the North, and through, 
all of this time was a contributor to the New York Independent, 
and since 1861 its editor-in-chief. Fagged out and despondent 
from exhaustion, rest was imperative. 

His church, with that generous love which has always charac- 
terized it, voted him a four months' leave of absence with ex- 
penses paid. 

In company with Dr. John Raymond, then the president of 
Vassar College, a warm personal friend, he set sail early in 
June for a holiday, making his second trip across the water. 

Fortunately we are able to give almost wholly in his own 
words the history of this trip : 

"I left New York in June, 1863, for a tour through Europe 
during the summer vacation. I was not requested, either by 
President Lincoln nor by any member of the Cabinet, to act in 
behalf of this government ; it was purely a personal arrangement. 

396 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 397 

The government took no stock in me at that time. Seward was 
in the ascendency, and, as I had been pounding Lincoln during 
the early years of the war, I don't believe there was a man in 
Washington, excepting perhaps Mr. Chase, who would have 
trusted me with anything ; at any rate, I went on my own respon- 
sibility, with no one behind me except my church. They told 
me they would pay my expenses and sent me off. I went away 
wholly for the sake of rest and recuperation. I went simply as a 
private citizen, and I went with a determination not to speak in 
Great Britain. 

" It was perhaps the dreariest period in the whole war. One 
after another of our generals had been sent to school in the field 
to learn the art of generalship. The task was too large for most 
of them, and they took a secondary rank. At that time, up to 
the date of my departure, we had made a stand and maintained 
it, but had gained but very little. The most defensible country, 
perhaps, on earth is our own in its southern portion ; and the line 
that ran two thousand miles of active warfare through our mid- 
dle had been so fortified, and was defended with such skill and 
unquestionable bravery, that our forces had not been able to 
push back the line of rebellion much, and there had been no- 
thing to encourage the hearts of our people beyond their faith — 
for we lived by faith and not by sight in those days. 

" I had not, except in times of sickness, when the whole tone 
of my nervous system was lowered, had an hour of doubt. I was 
sure of victory. There were some sick hours in which I remem- 
ber distinctly thinking, ' One nation is ground to make soil for 
another, and it may be that this nation will be ground up in 
order that another one may grow up on its ruins ' ; but ordinarily 
I was full of courage and hope, not unfounded I think now in 
review ; and it stood me in good stead abroad. 

" At that time Grant had not emerged. McClellan had, and 
had retired again. Burnside had briefly shown that he was too 
modest and not strong enough to take McClellan's place. 
Hooker, who had lost his head in the great battle which he 
fought, was at the head of affairs, and we were on the eve of one 
more change — a change which has surrounded the name of 
Meade with lustre. Grant was at the time besieging Vicksburg. 
Lee had not yet ventured into Pennsylvania, out of which he 
never ought to have been permitted to go. 



398 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" It was at about that stage of things that I left The politi- 
cal condition of the country, and also its civic and secular con- 
dition, will justify a word or two. There was a great party of 
the Union, made up of men indifferently from all foregoing par- 
ties. Old lines were effaced, old questions sank to the bottom, 
and the one question that united the strangest elements, discor- 
dant in every other respect, was the wise determination to main- 
tain intact the union of this whole country. That formed the 
band and belt that gave unity to the party of war. The great 
Democratic party was divided into three ranks. The largest 
part, and the noblest, joined themselves to the party of the 
Union ; and better men never came from any party than those 
that formed under our banner, bearing briefly and for a time the 
name of Republicans, but very largely going back again, after the 
war was over, to the Democratic party. There was a second di- 
vision of lukewarm Unionists in the Democratic party, that were 
always hoping the war would be compromised — men of great 
patriotism, who could not forbear to ask : ' What will be my 
position politically when we shall have secured peace again ? ' 
They were for compromise and for easy adjustment. 

" Now, war is good for nothing if it is not intense and cruel. 
It means organized force ; and it is nonsense to go into the field 
with anything else except guns in your hands and swords at your 
side. The attempt so to fight, as in the earlier periods of our 
struggle, as not to hurt anybody, is most disastrous, whether in 
prudence or in civil successes. The South never did make war 
except to hurt somebody ; and in the earlier day the vehemence, 
the courage, and the convictions which they brought into the 
field, made them more than a match for our Northern soldiers. 
Very largely our generals had anticipations of Congress, or the 
Presidency, or what not, before them ; and such political antici- 
pations never whet anybody's sword. 

" There was a third section, and that was the least — those that 
were directly in league with the Southern and slavery element. Of 
them it is not necessary that anything should be said. They are 
wiped out, and that is fulfilled in regard to them which the 
Scriptures hath spoken : 'The name of the wicked shall rot.' 

" In that divided state Lincoln was under great discourage- 
ments, yet maintaining invincible his purpose, without com- 
promise, to destroy all oppositions to this Union. Meanwhile 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 399 

we were maintaining a blockade of about three thousand miles — 
an unexampled blockade. We had to extemporize a navy, as we 
shall again if we have any war. We are always wise afterward. 
For the sake of economy we are the most wasteful of all nations, 
without foresight in such matters ; too confiding. There is not a 
ship in the American navy to-day that could not be blown out of 
the water in a ten minutes' conflict with the best-armored ships 
of Europe ; and Congress, that has no end of money for votes, 
through pensions and various other channels of distributing, 
cannot be persuaded to do anything for stability and inexorable 
defence against foreign invasion and warfare. 

" We had at that time converted almost every sea-going craft 
into a man-of-war ; and this extended blockade was in the main 
well served. Europe stood watching as a vulture does to see 
the sick lamb or kine stagger to fall, and from her dried branch 
of observation she was ready to plunge down. Napoleon did. 
He already had sent French armies into Mexico. That was a 
mere preface. Mexico was not his final object. The recovering 
again of territory that once had belonged to France lay in the 
achievements or the expectations of this weak and wicked poten- 
tate in the future. 

" In this condition of things we were hovering on the very 
edge of intervention. It was well known to those acquainted 
with the condition of affairs in other lands that Napoleon was 
disposed by every art ancl intrigue to persuade the government 
of Great Britain to interpose, to break the blockade, and to give 
its moral support to the rebellion of the South. 

" I found in England the utmost scepticism prevailing as to 
our success, and an exaggerated conception of the endurance 
and courage of the South ; and no sentence was more frequently 
uttered in my hearing than this, ' You will never subdue the 
South ' ; to which I invariably replied, ' We shall subdue the 
South.' 

" I found that, with a few noble exceptions — Mr. John Bright, 
Richard Cobden, Mr. Forster, and such like — that the statesmen 
of Great Britain were either lukewarm or in avowed sympathy 
with the South. The middle-class and laboring people of Great 
Britain were in sympathy, on the whole, with the North ; but 
they had no votes. As a general thing, the officeholders under 
the government, the rich families, the manufacturing interests, 



400 BIOGRAPHY OF 

the educated and professional men of Great Britain, believed that 
our Union had been or would soon be dissolved. Some one said 
to me at that time, 'All men who ride in first-class cars, and put 
up at first-class hotels, and live upon intellectual professions, to- 
gether with most of the clergymen, even of the dissenting bodies 
of England, are adverse to the Northern cause.' 

" The conduct of the laboring classes in Great Britain was 
admirable. While they were on the verge of starvation in the 
cotton districts, they patiently endured their sufferings without 
retracting their sympathy for the Northern cause. As a body, 
the Quakers, whose testimony against slavery had been continu- 
ous and unswerving, were in sympathy with the North. The 
Congregational churches of Great Britain, with few exceptions, 
were adverse to the North. The Congregational churches of 
Wales were almost wholly in sympathy with the North. 

" All the world looked upon America as about to be split asun- 
der. Here and there was a faithful witness and a faithful friend. 
The civilized nations of Europe looked with varying emotions upon 
our conflict, but agreed generally that it was an impossible task 
that the North had undertaken ; and everywhere I felt the numb- 
ness that that produced. 

" It was at just that period that I left our shores and was in 
Great Britain." 

From his letters home we have gathered something of an out- 
line of his experience and first impressions: 

" I reached the mouth of the Mersey, seven miles from Liver- 
pool, on Wednesday night. The tide would not let us across till 
five the next morning. . . . Duncan was on the tug when we 
reached the city — for there are no wharves at Liverpool, and we 
lay in the middle of the stream and landed passengers by means 
of a little steam-tug. . . . Before leaving the boat a Mr. Estcourt, 
of Manchester, was at hand to invite me to have a reception 
and speech at Manchester. The same happened for Liverpool 
within a few hours, and letters from London, from two committees, 
came within a day, soliciting the same. I declined them all and 
declared my intention not to speak anywhere at present, and until 
I had had time to form some judgment of things. I find that all 
our American friends at Liverpool approve highly of my decision. 
And even those who most solicited speeches admit that they 
think my decision the wiser one. I will not trouble you with any 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 



40I 



description of the state of the English mind toward our country. 
We have nothing to hope from it when it might be of use to us, 
and we shall not by and by care a pin whether they think ill or 
well." After a week's run in the country he returned to Liver- 
pool and "went to meet some friends at the parlor of a store. 
The great stores here have parlors, in which the heads of depart- 
ments dine every day. Gave them a plain talk about America. 
At the end, as we got familiar, they confessed that America had 
sufficient reason for her complaints against Great Britain. " 

Writing from London a week later : 

" Every man I meet who is on our side commends my deter- 
mination to keep quiet for the present. I do not mean in preach- 
ing, but public addresses and public receptions. There is but 
little favor for the North. Whatever may be said, a narrow but 
intense jealousy is felt, and fear of future rivalry. . . . 

"London, July 7. — On Monday of this week (yesterday) I met 
a circle of temperance men at a breakfast. It was private in 
this, that no reports were to be made or published. I gave 
them a good talk on our affairs. . . . To-day a like meeting 
with a section of anti-slavery men." 

He attended the meeting. Of course he was expected to 
make some remarks, and he did. He says, speaking of this 
incident : " Several speeches had been made when I was called 
upon, and made a statement expressing my indignation at the 
position of the Congregational clergy of England in view of this 
war. They were men who were seeking to know the signs of 
the times, and had as a whole body gone wrong and had virtually 
arrayed themselves on the side of slavery and against liberty. I 
put my best leg foremost, and, although I succeeded in making a 
favorable impression, I saw that I was likely to be regarded as an 
enthusiast, and so determined that I should clinch the arguments 
I had advanced with a speech from a calm-minded man, and ac- 
cordingly when I had concluded I said : ' Gentlemen, Dr. John 
Raymond, president of Vassar College, is present and will add a 
few views of his own.' He was a cool man and not easily ex- 
cited, but his sympathies were with the Union, and when he had 
kindled up to his work I sat and looked at him in perfect amaze- 
ment. He went at them like a hundred earthquakes, with a 
whirlwind thrown in. He made a magnificent speech, of such 
towering indignation as I never have heard before or since." 



402 BIOGRAPHY OF 

The expectation that the speeches would not be reported was 
misplaced ; there appears to have been " a chiel amang us takin' 
notes," and the substance of the speeches was quite fully re- 
ported the next day. 

Almost immediately thereafter he crossed over to the Conti- 
nent, and did not return to England until the following Sep- 
tember. 

He remained strongly disinclined to make any formal ad- 
dresses, though he had been urged to speak in London, Liver- 
pool, and Manchester on his return. 

Writing from Switzerland, July 28, to Mrs. Stowe, he refers to 
the two meetings in London, and his views regarding his return 
in the fall: 

" My time in London, where I spent ten days, was, for the 
last six or eight, spent in meeting private circles of gentlemen, 
and talking to them like a father. I breakfasted with almost a 
hundred from the Temperance Alliance, with seventy-five of the 
Congregational Liberty Association, with forty or fifty at a soiree 
at Mr. Evans's, president of the Emancipation League, where 
Baptist Noel was the questioner, and I responded for two hours. 
I hear since that great good was done, and at the time there was 
elicited a great deal of confession from many that they had been 
both ignorant and wrong. There was a universal and vehement 
desire that I should arrange to speak in London, and elsewhere, 
when I return to England in the autumn. If I see the way 
clear to do so, these conferences will have opened the door ef- 
fectually. Meanwhile I shall wait and watch the development 
of things. . . . But let me tell you that the root of all the con- 
duct of England is simple and absolute fear. I do not mean 
fear of a narrow and technical kind. But the shadow that the 
future of our nation already casts is so vast that they foresee 
they are falling into the second rank — that the will of the Re- 
public is to be the law of the world. There is no disguising of 
this among Englishmen. 

" I was told by Rev. Henry Allen, of London, eminent among 
the Congregationalists, that they had long felt that a time must 
come when England would have to take hold of us and curb 
our power, and that, now that we were divided against ourselves, 
they rejoice to see their work done for them. The Duke of 
Argyle distinctly recognized this feeling, not in himself but in 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 403 

others. Roebuck openly avowed it in the House of Commons. 
The papers on all hands abused him for it. But, in fact, it was 
because he spoke the truth, which they were ashamed to have 
spoken so boldly and openly. I met at Yungfrau a young 
Irishman, friendly, who gave the same view of English feel- 
ing. Indeed, I have searched into it and am thoroughly satis- 
fied that it is mainly and deeply the dread of our gigantic 
national development in the future, that has been coiled up as 
the main-spring under all the other reasons, excuses, and pre- 
tendings, and that has, consciously or unconsciously, moved the 
whole mind of England. Against this what will reasoning or ex- 
position avail ? Is there any explanation that will make England 
ready to stand second? Is there any way of stating our gigantic 
power that would lead her to rejoice in it ? I do not propose to 
pull wool over their eyes, nor to play the sheep in any way. For 
I distinctly see the difficulty. I know it to be unremovable, 
and all that can be done is to appeal to the higher feelings of the 
Christian part of England, that the elect few, in both countries, 
may hold fast the golden cords of love till God in His own way 
shall have settled the future." 

As late as August 27 we find him still in doubt as to what he 
will do in England ; at that date he writes : 

" When you read this, therefore, I shall probably be in Lon- 
don. I cannot yet decide anything about my course in England. 
From a distance I do not see any occasion or necessity for my 
squandering time there in speaking. . . ." 

On his way back to England he passed through Brussels ; 
while there he paid his respects to the United States minister, 
Mr. Sandford. We give his experience in his own words : 

" In drawing near to England I went to Brussels, and at a 
dinner by our American minister there, found him very much 
wavering as to our final success. I expressed such sentiments, 
and expressed them so firmly, as to lead him to wish that I 
should see King Leopold of Belgium, who was considered the 
wisest sovereign in Europe, and to whom Queen Victoria and 
others were accustomed to refer many questions for judgment or 
arbitration. 

" For the first and only time in my life I prepared myself for 
the ordeal. But oh ! consider it, ye that dwell at home, ye 
that sit at ease among flowers and all pleasant things — consider 



404 BIOGRAPHY OF 

my sufferings in a fashionable hat, a white cravat, and a pair of 
white gloves! Yes, it was even so ! I reluctated, but Sandford 
plead; and as it was more for his sake than my own that I con- 
sented to the interview at all, and also because the king was very 
influential with all the sovereigns of Europe, and especially with 
Victoria, and was pleased with attentions from Americans, I took 
to myself a hat, cravat, and gloves, and in an open barouche 
with two white horses, and Mr. Simmonds sitting by the side 
of the driver, large as life, and most happy to be the courier of 
a party called on in all the capitals by American ministers and 
consuls, and now going actually to see the king ! Happy, hap- 
py Simmonds ! The crowd stared ; the people gave way right 
and left ; the royal guard at the Governor's House opened ; we 
dismounted just at eleven (hat, cravat, gloves, and all). A golden- 
laced official received us at the lower door and jabbered French 
in our faces, which we answered by making for the stairs beyond 
him. At the top two officers, much dressed, bowed and seemed 
to be expecting us, showing us toward a pair of folding-doors 
which, opening into the ante-room, revealed to us an aide-de- 
camp in waiting, who took my card, walked softly to the next 
door, communed with some one within, returned, and said that 
in a moment the king would receive us. 

" In a moment the door opened, a servant beckoned us, and 
we entered. A tall man in full military uniform, blue, with 
eleven orders, crosses, etc., on his left breast, with hair black 
(not his own), of a face quite reverend, long, thin, somewhat 
corrugated, came towards us graciously and paternally, bowed 
gently, and began a conversation of our travels, of Europe, of 
America a little. Well, it was my duty, of course, always to ad- 
dress him as ' Sire,' but I generally managed to call him ' Sir ' 
with a hasty correction to ' Sire.' 

"After some conversation, in which he plainly intimated to 
me that he would rejoice in bringing us to terms and peace 
again, all the while intimating that the South could not be over- 
come, and that it would be very wise for us to make a compro- 
mise, and that he would be entirely willing to render service in 
that direction, I said to him: ' Your majesty' — I got it out once 
or twice right — ' if there were any ruling sovereign in Europe to 
whom more than to another we should be glad to refer this ques- 
tion, it would be to the king of Belgium, a judge among nations 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 405 

and adviser among kings ; but we do not propose to refer it to 
any one. \ We are going to fight it out ourselves ; the strongest 
will win in our conflict, and so it must be settled.' 

" Turning from that, he asked me what I thought of sending 
Maximilian to Mexico — for at that time he had not been sent to 
be the emperor of this new nation the Latins had established 
there ; and, without suitable diplomacy, I said to him : ' Your 
majesty, any man that wants to sit upon a throne in Mexico, I 
would advise to try Vesuvius first ; if he can sit there for a while, 
then he might go and try it in Mexico.' 

" This very soon brought our conversation to a close. He 
bowed, we bowed. He stepped back a step, we two, and, repeat- 
ing the operation, we were soon at the door and out of it." 

The next day finds Mr. Beecher at London. But a short time 
before, and while in Paris, an event occurred that had a marked 
effect upon his subsequent course in England and the results 
which he achieved. The news came to him of the fall of Vicks- 
burg and the repulse of Lee at Gettysburg : 

" Such a revulsion of feeling as I experienced myself, and 
such a revulsion and intoning as all patriotic Americans expe- 
rienced (for all Americans were not patriotic ; very largely they 
were commercial cowards), from those tidings, one can scarcely 
imagine who was not there to see. At this time I was staying in 
Paris at the Grand Hotel. It was on a radiant Sunday, as I 
wended my way from the hotel to the church, that the news came 
of the surrender of Vicksburg. No words can tell the buoy- 
ancy, the awful sense of gladness that I had. I went into the 
house of God and sat down in the pew of our minister to France, 
Mr. Dayton. By my side sat his daughter. In a pause in the 
service I turned to Miss Dayton and asked, ' Have you heard the 
news?' 'No,' said she, looking earnestly at me. ' Vicksburg 
has fallen /' 'Is it true?' * Yes, be sure.' She answered me not 
a word, but turning to her companion, another young lady, she 
whispered it to hfer, and both sat still as statues. The hymn 
was given out, the music sounded, and she began to sing ; but no 
sooner had she opened her lips than, in a flood of tears, she 
buried her face in her hands and wept for gladness and triumph. 
It overwhelmed her, and it overwhelmed me too. And before 
the sun went down, yea, before the sun was at noon, the other 
tidings came of the victory at Gettysburg ; and then my cup ran 



406 BIOGRAPHY OF 

over. No man can tell how victoriously I walked. In the ample 
court of the Grand Hotel there usually gathered a very large 
company of Southern men, to whom my name was not savory; 
and day after day, as I went out, they were wont to collect in one 
corner, and with sneers and undisguised attempts at insult they 
met me as I came in and went out, even sending contemptible 
messages to me by the servants (which I never received, being 
intercepted at the office, although I heard of them afterwards). 
But on that day when I heard that Lee had been driven out 
of Pennsylvania and that Vicksburg had surrendered to Grant, I 
put on my best coat, walked down -stairs and out into that court 
to see how it fared with my brethren of the South; but, alas! 
they were not there, not one of them. They, too, had heard 
something ! 

" The effect which these tidings produced throughout Great 
Britain was immense. Before this no avowed friend of the North 
could go through the Exchange in Liverpool without being 
looked at and watched, largely as one would look at a bear es- 
caped from a menagerie. My friend Charles Duncan had 
scarcely been able to transact business without being insulted at 
every step ; when the good news came he went down into the 
Exchange to look into the faces of these men that had been 
so insulting, but there was not a man in the whole Exchange who 
had not been on our side from the very beginning, and who had 
not always believed in us, in our cause, and in our final victory ! 
How wonderful are the workings of Providence ! 

" On returning to England representations were made to me 
which compelled me to consent to a series of public speeches. 
Our friends said : ' We have sacrificed ourselves in your behalf, 
and have been counted as the offscouring, because we had cham- 
pioned the cause of the North ; and now if you go home without 
making a recognition of our efforts we will be overwhelmed.' 
Aside from other considerations, I found that a movement was 
on foot to induce Parliament to declare for the Southern Confed- 
eracy. This they were very willing to do, but did not dare to 
without the approval of the unvoting English, who held great 
power. Steps had been taken by friends of the Southern cause 
to have orators go through the manufacturing districts for the 
purpose of enlisting the sympathies of the laboring classes. 

" By projecting a series of meetings on the other side it was 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 



407 



hoped that this mischievous course might be baffled and fore- 
stalled. At first there was thought of but a single speech, and 
that at Manchester. So soon as it was known that there was to 
be such a meeting applications were made from Glasgow, from 
Edinburgh, from Liverpool and London, for like meetings in 
these places." 



CHAPTER XX. 

Facing the Mob in Manchester — Glasgow — Edinburgh — Desperate At- 
tempts to break Mr. Beecher down at Liverpool — Victory in London. 

AFTER spending some days in the Lake district I went to 
Manchester to meet the engagement there for October 
9th. Great excitement existed ; the streets were pla- 
carded with vast posters, printed in blood-red, appealing to the 
passions and even to the spirit of violence on the part of the peo- 
ple. Threats resounded on every side. Both there and at Liver- 
pool afterwards it was declared that I should never come out of 
the audience alive. 

" I was met at the station by John Estcourt and young Watts, 
whose father was Sir Something Watts and had the largest busi- 
ness house in Central England. When they approached me I saw 
that there was something amiss, and before I had proceeded 
twenty steps they let the cat out of the bag : ' Of course you 
know there is a great deal of excitement here ' — at the same time 
pointing to placards printed in red letters, with which the streets 
were flooded, denouncing the Northern cause and all its advo- 
cates. I always feel happy when I hear of a storm, and I looked 
at them and said : 'Well, are you going to back down?' 'No,' 
said they, 'but we didn't know how you would feel.' 'Well,' 
said I, ' you'll find out how I'm going to feel. I'm going to be 
heard. I won't leave England until I have been heard.' 

" The Free Trade Hall, I was informed, held from five to six 
thousand. It was the purpose of our adversaries to break down 
my first speech in England there, and prevent my being heard 
thereafter. All the great papers of London and of the kingdom 
were represented. The tumult defies description. No Ameri- 
can audience, under any amount of excitement that I have ever 
known, could be compared for one moment with the condition of 
the audience at Manchester; and that was equalled, and surpassed 
even, by the one Subsequently at Liverpool. If one can imagine 
a shipmaster giving orders to a mutinous crew in the midst 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 



409 



of a tropical thunder-storm, he will have some faint idea of the 
task that was on my hands. 

" Although in every speech I was obliged to rehearse substan- 
tially the same general facts in regard to the questions at issue in 
America, yet each speech had a field peculiar to itself. In Man- 
chester I discussed the effect of slavery upon manufacturing in- 
terests of the world, and gave a history of the external political 
movement for fifty years past, so far as it was necessary to illus- 
trate the fact that the American war was only an overt and war- 
like form of a contest between liberty and slavery that had been 
going on politically for over half a century." 

After Mr. Beecher was introduced, and before he had fairly 
entered upon his speech, the mob began to show its teeth, and in 
a few seconds there was one unparalleled scene of riot and confu- 
sion. Mr. Beecher took the measure of his audience, about one- 
fourth of whom only were against him, but they made up in noise 
and tumult what they lacked in numbers. They had been sys- 
tematically bunched about the house, so as to make their inter- 
ruptions the more effective. He had come with his speech care- 
fully prepared in manuscript, but when the interruptions began 
he tossed the paper to one side, and, stepping forward, with head 
erect, said: " My friends, we will have a whole night's session, but 
we will be heard." It was like attempting to preach a sermon 
through a trumpet in a howling gale ; but the press was well rep- 
resented, and, bending forward, he said to the reporters : " Gen- 
tlemen, be kind enough to take down what I say. It will be in 
sections, but I will have it connected by and by." The uproar 
continued, and all sorts of insulting questions were hurled at the 
speaker. The latter, however, had made up his mind to be 
heard, and he was. He would wait until the noise had somewhat 
subsided, then, arresting the attention of the audience by some 
witticism, he would take advantage of the lull to give them some 
telling sentences. Finally, after about an hour of speaking by 
fits and starts, the audience became manageable. The English 
admire pluck, and they had an excellent example of the article 
before them, and finally could not fail to show their appreciation. 
His copl, determined appearance as he said, " I have many times 
encountered similar opposition, and afterwards been heard ; / 
shall be heard to-night" produced a marked effect, and in a short 
time thereafter the vast assemblage was brought in perfect silence 



4IO BIOGRAPHY OF 

and into full sympathy with the speaker. They listened during 
the remaining hour, and were convinced ; the next morning 
every paper in England printed the entire speech. 

Just as the speaker was drawing to a close, occurred a st r- 
ring incident that strongly emphasized the effect of this speech. 
The chairman, taking advantage of a slight pause, touched Mr. 
Beecher on the shoulder and whispered a few words to him. 
The latter retired sufficiently to give his place to the chairman, 
who, raising a paper which he held, said in a distinct voice : " I 
hold in my hand a telegram just received from London, stat- 
ing that her Majesty has to-night caused the ' broad arrow ' to be 
placed on the rams in Mr. Laird's yard at Birkenhead." This 
meant the stoppage of the ships which were being built for Con- 
federate cruisers. The effect was startling. The whole audience 
rose to its feet. Men cheered and waved their hats, while 
women waved their handkerchiefs and wept. 

At the conclusion of his address the feeling of the audience, 
which a short time previous had been a howling mob, can be 
best portrayed by the following incident : A big, burly English- 
man who was sitting in the gallery, seeing that it would be im- 
possible to reach Mr. Beecher to shake hands with him, cried, 
" Shake my umbrella," at the same time reaching it down to him. 
Mr. Beecher complied with the request, and as he did so the en- 
thusiastic Englishman cried, "By Jocks! nobody sha'n't touch 
that umbrella again ! " Hundreds of others, more fortunate, 
crowded in to shake the speaker's hand. 

Of course it will be impossible, within our space, to give the 
speeches entire, whilst an attempt at analysis would be like pre- 
senting a bony skeleton bared of its flesh, omitting all that gave 
them life and strength. But a few of the more striking passages 
from each speech may not be uninteresting : * 

" I have not come to England to be surprised that those men 
whose cause cannot "bear the light are afraid of free speech. I 
have had practice of more than twenty-five years, in the presence 
of tumultuous assemblies, opposing those very men whose repre- 
sentatives now attempt to forestall free speech. Little by little, 
I doubt not, I shall be permitted to speak to-night. Little by 

* These speeches have been reprinted in full in "Patriotic Addresses," 
by Messrs. Ford, Howard & Hulburt, of New York. 



REV. HEXRV WARD BEECHER. 411 

little I have been permitted in my own country to speak, until at 
last the day has come there, when nothing but the utterance of 
speech for freedom is popular. You have been pleased to speak 
of me as one connected with the great cause of civil and religious 
liberty. I covet no higher honor than to have my name joined 
to the list of that great company of noble Englishmen from 
whom we derived our doctrines of liberty. For although there is 
some opposition to what are here called American ideas, what are 
these American ideas ? They are simply English ideas bearing 
fruit in America. We bring back American sheaves, but the 
seed-corn we got in England ; and if, on a larger sphere and 
under circumstances of unobstruction, we have reared mightier 
harvests, every sheaf contains the grain that has made Old Eng- 
land rich for a hundred years. . . . 

" Allusion has been made by one of the gentlemen to words 
or deeds of mine that might be supposed to be offensive to Eng- 
lishmen. I am sure that in the midst of this mighty struggle at 
home, which has taxed every power and energy of our people, I 
have never stopped to measure and to think whether my words, 
spoken in truth and with fidelity to duty, would be liked in this 
shape or in that shape, by one or another person, either in Eng- 
land or America. I have had one simple, honest purpose, which 
I have pursued ever since I have been in public life, and that 
was, with all the strength that God has given to me, to maintain 
the cause of the poor and of the weak in my own country. And 
if, in the height and heat of conflict, some words have been 
over-sharp and some positions have been taken heedlessly, are 
you the men to call one to account ? What if some exquisite 
dancing-master, standing on the edge of a battle where Richard 
Cceur de Lion swung his axe, criticised him by saying that ' his 
gestures and postures violated the proprieties of polite life ' ? 
When dandies fight they think how they look, but when ?nen 
fight they think only of deeds. But I am not here either on trial 
or on defence. Here I am before you, willing to tell you what 
I think about England or any person in it. The same agencies 
which have been at work to misrepresent good men in our 
country to you, have been at work to misrepresent to us good 
men here ; and when I say to my friends in America that I have 
attended such a meeting as this, received such an address, and 
beheld such enthusiasm, it will be a renewed pledge of amity. 



4 1 2 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

I have never ceased to feel that war, or even unkind feelings be- 
tween two such great nations, would be one of the most unpar- 
donable and atrocious offences that the world ever beheld, and 
I have regarded everything, therefore, which needlessly led 
to those feelings out of which war comes, as being in itself 
wicked. The same blood is in us. We hold the same substan- 
tial doctrines. We have the same mission amongst the nations 
of the earth. Never were mother and daughter set forth to do 
so queenly a thing in the kingdom of God's glory as England 
and America. Do you ask why we are so sensitive, and why have 
we hewn England with our tongue as we have ? I will tell you 
why. There is no man who can offend you so deeply as the one 
you love most. . . . Now (whether we interpreted it aright or not 
is not the question), when we thought England was seeking op- 
portunity to go with the South against us of the North, it hurt us 
as no other nation's conduct could hurt us on the face of the 
globe ; and if we spoke some words of intemperate heat, we 
spoke them in the mortification of disappointed affection. It 
has been supposed that I have aforetime urged or threatened war 
with England. Never ! This I have said — and this I repeat 
now and here — that the cause of constitutional government, and 
of universal liberty as associated with it, in our country, was so 
dear, so sacred that, rather than betray it, we would give the last 
child we had; that we would not relinquish this conflict though 
other States rose and entered into a league with the South ; and 
that, if it were necessary, we would maintain this great doctrine 
of representative government in America against the armed world 
— against England and France. . . . We ask no help and no 
hindrance. We do not ask for material aid. We shall be grate- 
ful for moral sympathy ; but if you cannot give us moral sym- 
pathy we shall still endeavor to do without it. All that we say 
is, Let France keep away, let England keep hands off ; if we can- 
not manage this rebellion by ourselves, then let it not be manag- 
ed at all. We do not allow ourselves to doubt the issue of this 
conflict. It is -only a question of time. For such inestimable 
principles as are at stake — of self-government, of representative 
government, of any government at all; of free institutions rejected 
because they inevitably will bring liberty to slaves unless sub- 
verted, of national honor, and fidelity to solemn national 
trusts — for all these war is waged ; and if by war these shall be 



I 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 413 

secured, not one drop of blood will be wasted, not one life 
squandered. The suffering will have purchased a glorious future 
of inconceivable peace and happiness ! Nor do we deem the 
result doubtful. The population is in the North and West. The 
wealth is there. The popular intelligence of the country is there. 
There only is there an educated common people. The right 
doctrines of civil government are with the North. It will not be 
long before one thing more wiil be with the North — victory. 
Men on this side are impatient at the long delay ; but if we can 
bear it, can't you ? You are quite at ease ; we are not. You are 
not materially affected in any such degree as many parts of our 
own land are. But if the day shall come in one year, in two years, 
or in ten years hence, when the old stars and stripes shall float 
over every State of America ; if the day shall come when that 
which was the accursed cause of this dire and atrocious war — 
slavery — shall be done away ; if the day shall have come when 
through all the Gulf States there shall be liberty of speech, as 
there never has been ; when there shall be liberty of the press, as 
there never has been ; when men shall have common schools to 
send their children to, which they never have had in the South ; 
in short, if the day shall come when the simple ordinances, the 
fruition and privileges, of civil liberty, shall prevail in every part 
of the United States — it will be worth all the dreadful blood 
and tears and woe. You are impatient ; and yet God dwelleth 
in eternity, and has an infinite leisure to roll forward the affairs 
of men, not to suit the hot impatience of those who are but chil- 
dren of a day and cannot wait or linger long, but according to 
the infinite circle on which He measures time and events ! . . . 

" The institutions of America were shaped by the North ; but 
the policy of her government, for half a hundred years, by the 
South. All the aggression and filibustering, all the threats to 
England and tauntings of Europe, all the bluster of war which 
our government has assumed, have been under the inspiration 
and under the almost monarchical sway of the Southern oligar- 
chy. And now, since Britain has in the past been snubbed by 
the Southerners, and threatened by the Southerners, and domi- 
neered over by the Southerners — yet now Great Britain has 
thrown her arms of love around the Southerners, and turns 
from the Northerners. [A voice, 'No.'] She don't? I have 
only to say that she has been caught in very suspicious circum- 



4 1 4 BIOGRAPH Y OP 

stances. I speak as I have, perhaps as much as anything eise, 
to bring out from you this expression ; to let you know, what we 
know, that all the hostility felt in my country towards Great Bri- 
tain has been sudden, and from supposing that you sided with 
the South and sought the breaking up of our country ; and I 
want you to say to me, and through me to my countrymen, that 
those irritations against the North, and those likings for the 
South, that have been expressed in your papers, are not the feel- 
ings of the great mass of your nation. [Great cheering, the 
audience rising.] Those cheers already sound in my ears as the 
coming acclamations of friendly nations ; those waving handker- 
chiefs are the white banners that symbolize peace for all coun- 
tries. Join with us, then, Britons. From you we learnt the doc- 
trine of what a man was worth ; from you we learnt to detest all 
oppressions ; from you we learnt that it was the noblest thing a 
man could do to die for a right principle. And now, 
when we are set in that very course, and are giving our best 
blood for these most sacred principles, let the world understand 
that the common people of Great Britain support us. . . ." 

The attempt to " break Beecher down at his first speech " 
signally failed. He had beaten the mob. He had made him- 
self heard, and the full reports of his speech were scattered 
throughout the entire kingdom. Many crude misconceptions were 
corrected, not a few of his opponents were converted, while many 
others were forced to admit that they had received some new 
ideas respecting the North and the United States government. 
On the 13th he spoke in Glasgow, where the blockade-runners 
were being built, and where the laboring-classes were in some 
sense bribed by their occupation in the shipyards. Here were 
discussed the effects of slavery upon the welfare- of the working- 
classes the world over, showing the condition of work or labor 
necessitated by any profitable system of slavery, demonstrating 
that it brought labor into contempt, affixing to it the badge of 
degradation ; that a struggle to extend servile labor across the 
American continent interests every free workingman on the 
globe, and that the Southern cause was the natural enemy of free 
labor and the free laborer all the world over. 

A strong Southern sentiment existed here, and the same at- 
tempt was made as in Manchester to break the speaker down. 
The City Hall was crowded to its utmost limits with friends and 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECHER. 4 I 5 

opponents. The opposition here was neither so determined nor 
prolonged as at Manchester. His success there had encouraged 
him while it discouraged them. 

His opening sentences established a kindly bond between 
the hearers, so devotedly attached to their own country, and the 
speaker. Their kindly interest once aroused, it was not difficult 
to gain and keep their sympathy throughout the speech. The 
unruly element was soon put down, but little disturbance occur- 
ring after the first half-hour. 

" No one who has been born and reared in Scotland can know 
the feeling with which, for the first time, such a one as I have 
visited this land, classic in song and in history. I have been 
reared in a country whose history is brief. So vast is it that 
one might travel night and day for all the week, and yet scarcely 
touch historic ground. Its history is yet to be written ; it is yet 
to be acted. But I come to this land, which, though small, is as 
full of memories as the heaven is of stars, and almost as bright. 
There is not the most insignificant piece of water that does not 
make my heart thrill with some story of heroism or some remem- 
bered poem ; for not only has Scotland had the good fortune to 
have had men that knew how to make heroic history, but she has 
reared those bards who have known how to sing her histo- 
ries. ... I come to Scotland, almost as a pilgrim would go to 
Jerusalem, to see those scenes whose stories had stirred my imagi- 
nation from my earliest youth ; and I can pay no higher compli- 
ment than to say that, having seen some part of Scotland, I am 
satisfied; and permit me to say that if, when you know me, you 
are a thousandth part as satisfied with me as I am with you, we 
shall get along very well together. And yet, although I am not 
of a yielding mood nor easily daunted, I have some embarrass- 
ment in speaking to you to-night. I know very well that there 
are not a few things which prevent my doing good work among 
you. I differ greatly from many of you. I respect, although I 
will not adopt, your opinions. I can only ask as much from you 
for myself. I am aware that a personal prejudice has been dili- 
gently excited against me. ... It is not a pleasant avenue to a 
speech for a'man to walk through himself. But since every pains 
is taken to misrepresent me, let me once for all deal with that 
matter, in my own land I have been the subject of misrepre- 
sentation and abuse so long that when I did not receive it I felt 



416 BIOGRAPHY OF 

as though something was wanting in the atmosphere. I have 
been the object of misrepresentation at home simply and only 
because I have been arrayed, ever since I had a voice to speak 
and a heart to feel — body and soul I have been arrayed, without 
regard to consequences, and to my own reputation or my own 
ease, against that which I consider the damning sin of my country 
and the shame of human nature — slavery. I thought I had a 
right, when I came to Great Britain, to expect a different recep- 
tion ; but I found that the insidious correspondence of men in 
America had poisoned the British mind, and that representations 
had been made that I had indulged in the most offensive language 
and had threatened all sorts of things against Great Britain. Now, 
allow me to say that, having examined that interesting literature, 
so far as I have seen it published in British newspapers, I here 
declare that ninety-nine out of one hundred parts of those things 
that I am charged with saying I never said and never thought — 
they are falsehoods wholly and in particular. Allow me next to say 
that I have been accustomed freely and at all times, at home, to 
speak what I thought to be sober truth both of blame and of 
praise of Great Britain, and if you do not want to hear a man 
express his honest sentiments fearlessly, then I do not want to 
speak to you. If I never spared my own country, if I never 
spared the American Church, nor the government, nor my own 
party, nor my personal friends, did you expect I would spare 
you ? . . . I have heard the voice of my Master, saying, ' If any 
man come unto Me and hate not father, and mother, and brother, 
and sister, yea, and his own life also, he is not worthy of Me.' 
When, therefore, the cause of truth and justice is put in the scale 
against my own country, I would disown country for the sake of 
truth ; and when the cause of truth and justice is put in the scale 
against Great Britain, I would disown her rather than betray what 
I understood to be the truth. We are bound to establish liberty, 
regulated Christian liberty, as the law of the American Continent. 
This is our destiny, this is that towards which the education of 
the rising generation has been more and more assiduously di- 
rected as the peculiar glory of America — to destroy slavery and 
root it out of our land, and to establish in its place a discreet, in- 
telligent, constitutional, regulated Christian liberty. ... I call 
your attention to a few propositions, then, in reference to slavery 
as it exists in the extreme Southern States. And, first, the system 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 417 

of slavery requires ignorance in the slave, and not alone intellect- 
ual but moral and social ignorance. Anybody who is a slave- 
holder will find that there are reasons which will compel him to 
keep slaves in ignorance, if he is going to keep them at all. Not 
because intelligence is more difficult to govern ; for with an in- 
telligent people government is easier. . . . The slave would not 
be less easily governed if he were educated. If the slaveholder 
taught him to read and write, if he made him to know what he 
ought to know as one of God's dear children, the South would 
not be so much endangered by insurrection as she is now. There 
is nothing so terrible as explosive ignorance. Men without an 
idea, striking blindly and passionately, are the men to be feared. 
Even if the slaves were educated they would be better slaves. 
What is the reason, then, that slaves must be kept in ignorance ? 
The real reason is one of expense. In order to make slave labor 
profitable you must reduce the cost of the slave ; for the differ- 
ence between the profit and the loss turns upon the halfpenny 
per pound. If the price of slaves goes up and cotton goes 
down a shade in price, in ordinary times, the planters lose. The 
rule is, therefore, to reduce the cost of the man ; and the slave, 
to be profitable, must be simply a working creature. What does 
a man cost that is a slave ? Just a little meal and a little 
pork, a small measure of the coarsest cloth and leather — that is 
all he costs. Because that is all he needs — the lowest fare and 
the scantiest clothing. He is a man with two hands, and two 
feet, and a belly. That is all there is of a profitable slave. 
But every new development within him which religion shall 
make — the sense of fatherhood, the wish for a home, the desire 
to rear his children well, the wish to honor and comfort his 
wife, every taste, every sentiment, every aspiration — will drmand 
some external thing to satisfy it. His being augments. He 
demands more time. . . . Profitable slaveholding requires only so 
much intelligence as will work well, and only so much religion as 
will make men patient under suffering and abuse. More than 
that — more conscience, more ambition, more divine ideas of hu- 
man nature, of men's dignity, of household virtue, of Christian 
refinement — only makes the slave too costly in his tastes. Not 
only does the degradation of the slave pass over to his work, but 
it affects all labor, even when performed by free white men. 
Throughout the South there is the most marked public disesteem. 



4 1 8 BIO GRAPH V OF 

of honest homely industry. . . . But even in the most favored 
portions of the South manual labor is but barely redeemed from 
the taint of being a slave's business, and nowhere is it honored as 
it is in the great and free North. Whereas, in the richer and more 
influential portions of the South, labor is so degraded that men are 
ashamed of it. It is a badge of dishonor. The poor and shift- 
less whites, unable to own slaves, unwilling to work themselves, 
live in a precarious and wretched manner but a little removed 
from barbarism, relying upon the chase for much of their sub- 
sistence, and affording a melancholy spectacle of the condition 
into which the reflex influence of slavery throws the neighboring 
poor whites. Having turned their own industry over to slaves, 
and established the province and duties of a gentleman to consist 
of indolence and politics, it is not strange that they hold the peo- 
ple of the North in great contempt. The North is a vast hive of 
universal industry. Idleness there is as disreputable as is labor 
in the South. The child's earliest lesson is faithful industry. 
The boy works, the man works. Everywhere through all the 
North men earn their own living by their own industry and in- 
genuity. They scorn to be dependent. They revolt at the dis- 
honor of living upon the unrequited labor of others. Honest 
labor is that highway along which the whole body of the Northern 
people travel towards wealth and usefulness. From Northern 
looms the South is clothed, from their anvils come all Southern 
implements of labor, from their shops all modern ware, from 
their lasts Southern shoes. The North is growing rich by its 
own industry. No wonder, then, that Southerners have been wont 
to deride the free workmen of the North. Governor Hammond 
only gave expression to the universal contempt of Southern slave- 
holders for work and workmen when he called the Northern 
laborer the ' mudsill of society,' and stigmatized the artisan as 
the ' greasy mechanic' The North and South alike live by 
work : the North by their own work, the South by that of their 
slaves ! Which is the more honorable ? I have a right to 
demand of the workmen of Glasgow that they should refuse 
their sympathy to the South, and should give their hearty sym- 
pathy to those who are, like themselves, seeking to make work 
honorable and to give to the workman his true place in society. 
Disguise it as they will, distract your attention from it as they 
may, it cannot be concealed that the American question is the 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 419 

workingmaris question all over the world ! The slavemaster's 
doctrine is that capital should own labor — that the employers 
should own the employed. This is Southern doctrine and 
Southern practice. Northern doctrine and Northern practice 
is that the laborer should be free, intelligent, clothed with full 
citizen's rights, with a share of the political duties and honors. 
The North has from the beginning crowned labor with honor. 
Nowhere else on earth is it so honorable." 

On the following evening, October 14, he spoke in Edinburgh. 
The crowd, that packed the hall and completely blocked the 
entrances, was so vast that it very nearly deprived the meeting 
of both chairman and speaker. With great difficulty they man- 
aged to struggle through and finally reached the platform. 
Edinburgh being a centre of refinement and learning, Mr. 
Beecher aimed to give some idea of the philosophy of slavery, 
showing, how, out of separate colonies and States intensely jealous 
of their individual sovereignty, there grew up and was finally es- 
tablished a nation; and how, in that nation of united States, the 
distinct and antagonistic systems were developed and strove for 
the guidance of the national policy, which struggle at length 
passed and the North gained the control. Thereupon the South 
abandoned the Union, simply and solely because the govern- 
ment was in future to be administered by men who would give 
their whole influence to freedom. Comparatively speaking, but 
little opposition was encountered at this meeting. At the outset 
some disturbance was attempted, but the temper of the audience 
was opposed to the unruly ones and they were soon quieted. 
The speech produced a marked impression, the resolution and 
vote of thanks being carried with " loud and prolonged applause." 
We give a few extracts from it : 

" During the last fifteen years I believe you cannot find a 
voice, printed or uttered, in the cotton States of the South, which 
deplored slavery. All believed in and praised it, and found 
authority for it in God's Word. Politicians admired it, mer- 
chants appreciated it, the whole South sang paeans to the new- 
found truth that man was born to be owned by man. This 
change ot doctrine made it certain that the South would be an- 
noyed and irritated by a Constitution which, with all its faults, 
still carried the God-given principle of human rights, which were 
not to be taken by man except in punishment for crime. That 



420 



BIOGRAPHY OF 



Constitution, and the policy which went with it at first, began to 
gnaw at, and irritate, and fret the South when they had adopted 
slavery as a doctrine. How could they live in peace under a 
Constitution that all the time declared the manhood of men and 
the dignity of freedom ? It became necessary that they should 
do one of two things, either give up slavery or appropriate the 
government to themselves, and in some way or other drain out of 
the Constitution this venom of liberty and infuse a policy more 
in harmony with Southern ideas. They took the latter course. 
They contrived to possess themselves of the government ; and 
for the last fifty years the policy of the country has been 
Southern. Was a tariff wanted ? It was made a Southern 
tariff. Was a tariff oppressive ? The Southerners overthrew 
it. Was a tariff wanted again ? The Southern policy declared 
it to be necessary, and it was passed. Was more territory 
wanted ? The South must have its way. Was any man to ob- 
tain a place ? If the South opposed it he had no chance what- 
ever. For fifty years most of the men who became judges, who 
sat in the presidential chair and in the courts, had to base 
their opinions on slavery or on Southern views. All the filibus- 
tering, all the intimidations of foreign powers, all the so-called 
snubbing of European powers, happened during the period in 
which the policy of the country was controlled by the South. 
May I be permitted to look on it as a mark of victorious Chris- 
tianity that England now loves her worst enemy, and is sitting 
with arms of sympathy round her neck ? The man who was an 
Abolitionist when I was twenty-one years of age might bid fare- 
well to any hopes of political advancement ; and the merchant 
who held these opinions was soon robbed of customers. As far 
as I remember, there was nothing in the world that so ruined a 
man — not crime itself was so fatal to a man's standing in the 
country — as to be known to hold abolition sentiments. The 
churches sought to keep the question of slavery out ; so did the 
schools and colleges ; so did synods and conventions. But still 
the cause of abolition progressed ; and still, as is always the case 
with everything that is right, though the men who held those 
sentiments were scoffed at, though such men as Garrison were 
dragged through the streets with halters round their necks, yet 
the more it was spoken of and canvassed the more the cause 
prospered, because it was true. The insanity at last abated ; for 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 42 I 

the command came from on High saying to the evil spirit con- 
cerning the North: 'I command thee to come out of her.' 
Then the nation wallowed on the ground and foamed at the 
mouth ; but the unclean spirit passed out, and she became 
clean. The more some people wanted to keep down this subject 
and keep out the air, the more God forced the subject on their 
minds. When Missouri knocked at the door there were those 
who opposed its admission as a slave State, but by Southern 
management and intimidation Henry Clay persuaded the North 
to a compromise. Now, when there is no difference in prin- 
ciple, but only conflicting interests, a compromise is honorable 
and right ; but when antagonistic principles are in question I 
believe compromises to be bargains with the devil, who is never 
cheated. . . . We do not want to quarrel ; we do not want ani- 
mosity between Great Britain and America. No man has spoken 
of Great Britain words of praise and blame with more honest 
heart than I have. That man is not your friend who dares not 
speak of your faults to your face. The man that is your friend, 
tells you when he thinks you are wrong ; and whether I am right 
or wrong, I assert that in giving moral sympathy largely to the 
South, and, above all, in allowing the infamous traffic of your 
ports with the rebels, thus strengthening the hands of the slave- 
holders — and that without public rebuke — you have done 
wrong. I have said this because, dear as your country is to us, 
precious as were the legacies given to us of learning and re- 
ligion, and proud as we have been for years past to think of our 
ancestry and common relationship to you, yet so much dearer 
to us than kindred is the cause of God that, if Great Britain sets 
herself against us, we shall not hesitate one moment on her 
account, but shall fulfil our mission ! . . . I have a closing word 
to speak. It is our duty in America, by every means in our 
power, to avoid all cause of irritation with every foreign nation, 
and with the English nation most especially. On your side it is 
your duty to avoid all irritating interference, and all speech that 
tends to irritate. Brothers should be brothers all the world over, 
and you are of our blood, and we are of your lineage. May that 
day be far distant when Great Britain and America shall turn 
their backs on each other and seek an alliance with other na- 
tions ! The day is coming when the foundations of the earth will 
be lifted out of their places ; and there are two nations that 



42 2 BIOGRAPHY OF 

ought to be found shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand for 
the sake of Christianity and universal liberty, and these nations 
are Great Britain and America." 

The effect of these three speeches was being very widely 
felt. It looked at first as though the backbone of opposition 
had been broken. 

This pleasant impression was soon dispelled. The mob 
spirit was not dead ; it was only resting and gaining breath for 
a final and more desperate effort. 

The next speech was to be in Liverpool on the 16th, at the 
great Philharmonic Hall. 

Liverpool was the headquarters of the Southern sympathizers. 
A great many Southern men were there. 

The feeling was very strong that if Mr. Beecher should suc- 
ceed there he would carry the day. A determined and desperate 
effort was to be made, at any cost, to prevent the delivery of 
the speech. 

The streets were placarded with abusive and scurrilous pla- 
cards, often posted over the notices of the meeting, couched in 
the most inflammatory language, urging that " Englishmen see 
that he gets the welcome he deserves." On the morning of the 
1 6th the leading papers came out with violent editorials against 
Mr. Beecher, full of falsehoods and misquotations from his 
speeches. Every art was resorted to to work the passion of the 
mob up to the point of violence. 

We quote a brief extract from the Liverpool Courier of that 
date : 

" The visit of Mr. Henry Ward Beecher to Liverpool to-night 
is not likely to do the Federal cause much service in this neigh- 
borhood. His views on slavery are too violent and unreasonable 
to meet with much favor from thoughtful people ; and even those 
who earnestly desire the freedom of the Southern slaves would 
not consent to adopt the extreme, sanguinary principles enun- 
ciated by Mr. Beecher. . . . But, apart from his abolition doc- 
trines, Mr. Beecher, unless he has been greatly misrepresented, 
has displayed the most intense hatred of Great Britain, and has 
vilified the British people in a disgraceful manner. He was most 
violent in his denunciations of England during the never-to-be- 
forgotten Trent affair, and if his views had been adopted the 
two great Anglo-Saxon peoples would have been plunged into 



rev. henry ward beech er. 423 

war When he said, 'The best blood of England must flow for 
the outrage England had perpetrated upon America,' he used 
language unbecoming a man, still more a professing preacher of 
the Gospel. Yet ihe person who could thus insult the British 
n ition has now the audacity to come amongst us to lecture us on 
American politics. Such conduct evidences unbounded im- 
pudence and little discretion, and can only be explained by the 
assumption that he is the accredited emissary of the Federal 
government." 

It was openly declared that if he should dare to address the 
meeting he would never leave the hall alive — a threat believed to 
have been sincerely made, witli the fullest intention of fulfilment. 
The friends of Mr. Beecher were greatly alarmed, many advis- 
ing him not to attend the meeting. 

He was fully conscious of the risk that he ran, and knew that 
to be present was to carry his life in his hand. During the whole 
day he was under the shadow of a black cloud. He was plunged 
into the depths of despondency. He was going to the meeting, but 
would he leave it alive ? Could he make himself heard ? Must 
he fail now that he was on the very verge of success ? These 
and similarly anxious thoughts tormented him throughout the day. 
No light illumined the darkness of his soul until, having left the 
hotel, he was on his way to the hall ; then, he says, suddenly a 
great light burst in upon him, and, night though it was, it seemed 
as if the whole heavens blazed with light like the noonday. 
Fears and anxious doubts disappeared like mists before the 
morning sun. A great peace settled down upon him, and as he 
entered the hall he was filled with the certainty of succeeding. 

It was well known that the mob was armed ; it was not so 
well known that a small but determined band of young men, 
occupying a commanding position to the right of the platform, 
were also armed, determined, if any dangerous outbreak occurred, 
to protect Mr. Beecher at all hazards. Mr. Beecher himself 
was in ignorance of the fact until some days later. Happily 
nothing more serious than noise was developed, the cool and 
determined appearance of the speaker and the earnest demonstra- 
tion by the majority present seeming to discourage a resort to 
violence. 

The speech was devoted to a discussion of the relation of 
slavery to commerce, showing that, in the long run, it was as 



424 BIOGRAPHY 6P 

hostile both to commerce and manufactures the world over as it 
was to free interests in human society ; that a slave nation must 
be a poor customer, buying the poorest and fewest goods, and the 
least profitable to the producers ; that it was the interest of every 
manufacturing country to promote freedom, intelligence, and 
wealth amongst all nations ; that the attempt to cover the fairest 
portion of the globe with a slave population that buys nothing 
and a degraded white population that buys next to nothing, should 
array against it every political economist and every thoughtful 
and far-seeing manufacturer, as tending to strike at the vital 
wants of commerce, which was not cotton but rich customers. 

It would be impossible for tongue or pen adequately to de- 
scribe the scenes at the meeting. The great hall was packed to 
the crushing point. The mob was out in force, with lungs in 
good working order and a disposition to use them to the best ad- 
vantage. 

Manchester and Glasgow were love-feasts in comparison. 

We give an attempt at description from one of the Liverpool 
papers : 

" For several days before the meeting it was understood that 
efforts would be made to create a disturbance. 

" For some moments before the time fixed for the commence- 
ment of the proceedings, cat-calls, groans, cheers, hisses, etc., 
were freely indulged in, and it was evident that a strong force of 
the pro-Southern (or at least of the anti-Beecher) party had con- 
gregated in front of the gallery and at the lower end of the body 
of the hall. The debut of the Rev. Mr. Beecher was, judging 
from the frequently manifested impatience of the audience, 
awaited with intense interest. Several occupants of seats in the 
upper gallery loudly insisted upon somebody bringing him out ; 
and when the reverend gentleman did step on the platform, the 
enthusiasm of his friends and the indignation of his opponents 
were almost indescribable. Cheer rolled after cheer with deaf- 
ening effect, and, in the brief pauses between each hurrah, hisses 
fell upon the ear -with a sound like that of a falling torrent. The 
uproar was maintained so long that the chairman, Mr. Robertson, 
determined not to await the abatement of the storm, but to try to 
subdue it by a few judicious words. He was only partly success- 
ful until he appealed to the audience as Englishmen to stand up 
for fair play and not to withhold justice from a stranger. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECIIER. 425 

" Mr. Beecher's introduction surprised though it did not dis- 
concert that gentleman. He was evidently prepared for some op- 
position ; but he could hardly have expected that his appearance 
at the front of the platform, would rouse one portion of the audi- 
ence to a high state of enthusiasm, and cause the other portion to 
approach almost a state of frenzy. For some time it was doubtful 
whether the celebrated Abolitionist would be allowed to speak ; 
but those who sat near the reverend gentleman, and observed his 
firmly-compressed lips and imperturbable demeanor, saw at once 
that it would require something more than noise and spasmodic 
hisses to cause Mr. Beecher to lose heart. He stood calmly at 
the edge of the platform, a representation of ' patience smiling at 
grief,' and a simile of sincerity, battling tacitly but successfully 
with opposition. One of the two must sooner or later give way, 
and no one who scrutinized Mr. Beecher's features could imagine 
that he would be the first to become tired. At last there was a 
lull ; clergymen and ladies ceased to wave their umbrellas and 
handkerchiefs, the torrent of hisses became less perceptible, and 
the chairman made another appeal to the meeting for fair play 
to Mr. Beecher. His assurance that an opportunity would be 
offered, after Mr. Beecher had concluded his address, to persons 
who wished to ask the reverend gentleman questions, was not 
very favorably received, and a series of disturbances ensued. 
Cries of ' Turn him out ! ' were heard in various parts of the 
hall, and efforts were made to eject some members of the unruly 
party. When the scuffling had partly subsided, the chairman ex- 
pressed his determination to preserve order by calling in, if nec- 
essary, the aid of the police. This announcement produced 
something like order, and Mr. Beecher took up the advantage 
and commenced his address. The interruptions were incessant, 
while a scene prevailed the equal of which has seldom been wit- 
nessed in Liverpool. • Three cheers for Jeff. Davis ! ' was a pro- 
posal which once more met with a hearty response from a por- 
tion of the audience; and as the admirers of the Confederate 
President were loath to cease their expressions of approval, Mr. 
Beecher composedly sat down on the low parapet of the platform 
and awaited a calm, at the same time apologizing to the reporters 
for causing them to be so long detained. At one time, about a 
score of persons were speaking in various parts of the hall, and 
Mr. Beecher, as a last resource, said that if the meeting would 



426 BIOGRAPHY OF 

not hear him he would address the reporters. From the gallery 
were suspended placards on which the words, ' Who is Henry 
Ward Beecher?' were conspicuous; and, taken all in all, the 
scene was one of complete disorder. Mr. Beecher repeatedly 
declared that it was not new to him ; but he admitted that his 
struggle for an hour and a half against the prevailing disorder 
had caused his voice to fail. So far, indeed, had his voice suf- 
fered that he was compelled, in concluding, to declare that he 
could not answer any questions unless perfect order prevailed. 
He did reply, in comparative peace, to one or two written inter- 
rogatories ; but, the disturbance being renewed, Mr. Beecher sat 
down." 

A few quotations from this speech will not-only give an idea 
of the line of Mr. Beecher's argument, but, by retaining the inter- 
ruptions as indicated by the reports in the next day's papers, will 
also to some extent show the conditions under which the speech 
was delivered. 

" For more than twenty-five years I have been made perfectly 
familiar with popular assemblies in all parts of my country except 
the extreme South. There has not for the whole of that time 
been a single day of my life when it would have been safe for me 
to go south of Mason and Dixon's line in my own country, and 
all for one reason : my solemn, earnest, persistent testimony 
against that which I consider to be the most atrocious thing un- 
der the sun — the system of American slavery in a great, free 
republic. [Cheers.] I have passed through that early period 
when right of free speech was denied to me. Again and again I 
have attempted to address audiences that, for no other crime 
than that of free speech, visited me with all manner of con- 
tumelious epithets ; and now since I have been in England, 
although I have met with greater kindness and courtesy on the 
part of most than I deserved, yet, on the other hand, I perceive 
that the Southern influence prevails to some extent in England. 
[Applause and uproar.] It is my old acquaintance ; I understand 
it perfectly [laughter], and I have always held it to be an unfailing 
truth that where a man had a cause that would bear examination 
he was perfectly willing to have it spoken about. [Applause.] 
And when in Manchester I saw those huge placards, 'Who is 
Henry Ward Beecher?' [laughter, cries of * Quite right,' and 
applause], and when in Liverpool I was told that there were those 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 427 

blood-red placards, purporting to say what Henry Ward Beecher 
had said, and calling upon Englishmen to suppress free speech — 
I tell you what I thought ; I thought simply this : ' I am glad of 
it.' [Laughter.] Why? Because if they had felt perfectly secure 
that you are the minions of the South and the slaves of slavery, 
they would have been perfectly still. [Applause and uproar.] 
. . . And, therefore, when I saw so much nervous apprehen- 
sion that if I were permitted to speak [hisses and applause] — 
when I found they were afraid to have me speak [hisses, laugh- 
ter, and ' No, no ' ] ; when I found that they considered my 
speaking damaging to their cause [applause] ; when I found 
that they appealed from facts and reasonings to mob law [ap- 
plause and uproar], I said : No man need tell me what the heart 
and secret counsel of these men are. They tremble and are 
afraid. [Applause, laughter, hisses, 'No, no,' and a voice: 
'New York mob.'] Now, personally, it is a matter of very little 
consequence to me whether I speak here to-night or not. [Laughter 
and cheers.] But one thing is very certain — if you do permit me 
to speak here to-night you will hear very plain talking. [Applause 
and hisses.] You will not find a man [interruption] — you will not 
find me to be a man that dared to speak about Great Britain 3,000 
miles off, and then is afraid to speak to Great Britain when he stands 
on her shores. [Immense applause and hisses.] And if I do not 
mistake the tone and the temper of Englishmen, they had rather 
have a man who opposes them in a manly way [applause from 
all parts of the hall] than a sneak that agrees with them in an 
unmanly way. [Applause and 'Bravo.'] Now, if I can carry 
you with me by sound convictions, I shall be immensely glad 
[applause] ; but if I cannot carry you with me by facts and 
sound arguments, I do not wish you to go with me at all ; and all 
that I ask is simply fair play. [Applause, and a voice : ' You 
shall have it, too.'] Those of you who are kind enough to wish 
to favor my speaking — and you will observe that my voice is 
slightly husky, from having spoken almost every night in succes- 
sion for some time past — those who wish to hear me will do me the 
kindness simply to sit still and to keep still; and I and my friends 
the Secessionists will make all the noise. It is just as important 
to have customers educated, intelligent, moral, and rich out of 
Liverpool as it is in Liverpool. [Applause.] They are able to 
buy ; they want variety, they want the very best ; and those are 



428 BIOGRAPHY OF 

the customers you want. That nation is the best customer that 
is freest, because freedom works prosperity, industry, and wealth. 
Great Britain, then, aside from moral considerations, has a direct 
commercial and pecuniary interest in the liberty, civilization, and 
wealth of every people and every nation on the globe. [Loud 
applause.] You have also an interest in this, because you are a 
moral and a religious people. ['Oh! oh! ' laughter, and applause.] 
You desire it from the highest motives ; and godliness is profita- 
ble in all things, having the promise of the life that is, as well as 
of that which is to come ; but if there were no hereafter, and if 
man had no progress in this life, and if there were no question of 
civilization at all, it would be worth your while to protect civiliza- 
tion and liberty, merely as a commercial speculation. To evan- 
gelize has more than a moral and religious import — it conies back 
to temporal relations. Wherever a nation that is crushed, 
cramped, degraded under despotism is struggling to be free, you, 
Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Paisley, all have an interest that 
that nation should be free. When depressed and backward peo- 
ple demand that they may have a chance to rise — Hungary, Italy, 
Poland — it is a duty for humanity's sake, it is a duty for the 
highest moral motives, to sympathize with them ; but beside all 
these there is a material and interested reason why you should 
sympathize with them. Pounds and pence join with conscience 
and with honor in this design. Now, Great Britain's chief want 
is — what ? They have said that your chief want is cotton. I deny 
it. Your chief want is consumers. [Applause and hisses.] . : . 
Now, there is in this a great and sound principle of political 
economy. ['Yah ! yah ! ' from the passage outside the hall, and 
loud laughter.] If the South should be rendered independent — 
[at this juncture mingled cheering and hisses became immense ; 
half the audience rose to their feet, v waving hats and handker- 
chiefs, and in every part of the hall there was the greatest com- 
motion and uproar.] You have had your turn now ; now let me 
have mine again. [Loud applause and laughter.] It is a little 
inconvenient to talk against the wind ; but, after all, if you will 
just keep good-natured — I am not going to lose my temper ; will 
you watch yours? [Applause.] Besides all that, it rests me, 
and gives me a chance, you know, to get my breath. [Applause 
and hisses.] And I think that the bark of those men is worse 
than their bite. They do not mean any harm — they don't know 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 429 

any better. [Loud laughter, applause, hisses, and continued up- 
roar.] What will be the result if this present struggle shall 
eventuate in the separation of America, and making the South 
[loud applause, hisses, hooting, and cries of ' Bravo ! '] a slave 
territory exclusively [cries of ' No, no,' and laughter], and the 
North a free territory — what will be the first result ? You will 
lay the foundation for carrying the slave population clear through 
to the Pacific Ocean. There is not a man that has been a leader 
of the South any time within these twenty years that has not had 
thi^ for a plan. Never have they for a moment given up the plan 
of spreading the American institutions, as they call them, straight 
through towards the West, until the slave who has washed his 
feet in the Atlantic shall be carried to wash them in the Pacific. 
[Cries of 'Question!' and uproar.] There! I have got that 
statement out, and you cannot put it back. [Laughter and ap- 
plause.] . . . Now, here are twelve millions of people, and only 
one-third of them are customers that can afford to buy the kind 
of goods that you bring to market. [Interruption and uproar.] 
My friends, I saw a man once, who was a little late at a railway 
station, chase an express-train. He did not catch it. [Laughter.] 
If you are going to stop this meeting you have got to stop it be- 
fore I speak ; for after I have got the things out you may chase 
as long as you please — you will not catch them. [Laughter 
and interruption.] But there is luck in leisure ; I'm going to take 
it easy. [Laughter.] Two-thirds of the population of the 
Southern States to-day are non-purchasers of English goods. [A 
voice, ' No, they are not,' ■ No, no,' and uproar.] And if by 
sympathy or help you establish a slave empire, you sagacious 
Britons ['Oh! oh!' and hooting] — if you like it better, then, I 
will leave the adjective out [laughter, hear, and applause] — you 
will be busy in favoring the establishment of an empire from 
ocean to ocean that should have fewest customers and the largest 
non-buying population. [Applause; 'No, no.'] . . . It was the 
South that obliged the North to put the tariff on. [Applause 
and uproar.] Just as soon as we begin to have peace again and 
can get our national debt into a proper shape, as you have got 
yours [laughter], the same cause that worked before will begin 
to work again ; and there is nothing more certain in the future 
than that the American is bound to join with Great Britain in the 
world-wide doctrine of free-trade. [Applause and interruption.] 



430 BIOGRAPHY OF 

Here, then, so far as this argument is concerned, I rest my case, 
saying that it seems to me that in an argument addressed to a 
commercial people it was perfectly fair to represent that their 
commercial and manufacturing interests tallied with their moral 
sentiments ; and as by birth, by blood, by history, by moral feel- 
ing, and by everything, Great Britain is connected with the liberty 
of the world, God has joined interest and conscience, head and 
heart, so that you ought to be in favor of liberty everywhere. 
[Great applause.] There! I have got quite a speech out al- 
ready, if I do not get any more. [Hisses and applause.] . . . 
" It is said that the North is fighting for Union, and not for 
emancipation. The North is fighting for Union, because we 
never shall forget the testimony of our enemies. They have gone 
off declaring that the Union in the hands of the North was fatal 
to slavery. [Loud applause.] There is testimony in court for 
you. [A voice, ' See that,' and laughter.] We are fighting for 
the Union, because we believe that preamble which explains the 
very reason for which the Union was constituted. I will read it. 
' We ' — not the States — ' We, the people of the United States, in 
order to form a more perfect nation ' [uproar] — I don't wonder 
you don't want to hear it [laughter] — • in order to form a more 
perfect nation, establish justice, assure domestic tranquillity [up- 
roar], provide for the common defence, promote the general wel- 
fare, and secure the blessings of liberty ['oh! oh !'] to ourselves 
and our posterity, ordain and establish this Constitution of the 
United States of America.' [A voice: 'How many States?'] 
It is for the sake of that justice, that common welfare, and that 
liberty for which the National Union was established, that we 
fight for the Union. [Interruption.] Because the South believ- 
ed that the Union was against slavery, they left it. [Renewed in- 
terruption.] Gentlemen, I have travelled in the West ten or 
twelve hours at a time in the mud knee-deep. It was hard toil- 
ing my way, but I always got through my journey. I feel to- 
night as though I were travelling over a very muddy road ; but I 
think I shall get through. [Cheers.] ... In the first place, I 
am ashamed to confess that such was the thoughtlessness [inter- 
ruption], such was the stupor of the North [renewed interruption] 
— you will get a word at a time ; to-morrow will let folks see 
what it is you don't want to hear — that for a period of twenty- 
five years she went to sleep, and permitted herself to be drugged 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 43 I 

and poisoned with the Southern prejudice against black men. 
[Applause and uproar.] . . . When I was twelve years old my 
father hired Charles Smith, a man as black as lampblack, to work 
on his farm. I slept with him in the same room. ['Oh ! oh !'] 
Ah ! that don't suit you. [Uproar.] Now, you see, the South 
comes out. [Loud laughter.] I ate with him at the same table ; 
I sang with him out of the same hymn-book [' Good '] ; I cried 
when he prayed over me at night ; and if I had serious impres- 
sions of religion early in life, they were due to the fidelity and ex- 
ample of that poor humble farm-laborer, black Charles Smith. 
[Tremendous uproar and cheers.] . . . There is another fact that 
I wish to allude to — not for the sake of reproach or blame, but 
by way of claiming your more lenient consideration — and that is, 
that slavery was entailed upon us by your action. [Hear, hear.] 
Against the earnest protests of the colonists the then government 
of Great Britain — I will concede not knowing what were the mis- 
chiefs — ignorantly, but in point of fact, forced slave-traffic on the 
unwilling colonists. [Great uproar, in the midst of which one 
individual was lifted up and carried out of the room amidst cheers 
and hisses.] . . . We do not agree with the recent doctrine of 
neutrality as a question of law. But it is past, and we are not 
disposed to raise that question. We accept it now as a fact, and 
we say that the utterance of Lord Russell at Blairgowrie [ap- 
plause, hisses, and a voice, 'What about Lord Brougham?'], 
together with the declaration of the government in stopping war- 
steamers here [great uproar and applause], has gone far towards 
quieting every fear and removing every apprehension from our 
minds. [Uproar and shouts of applause.] And now in the fu- 
ture it is the work of every good man and patriot not to create 
divisions, but to do the things that will make for peace. [' Oh ! 
oh !' and laughter.] On our part it shall be done. [Applause 
and hisses, and ' No, no.'] On your part it ought to be done ; 
and when, in any of the convulsions that come upon the world, 
Great Britain finds herself struggling single-handed against the 
gigantic powers that spread oppression and darkness [applause, 
hisses, and uproar], there ought to be such cordiality that she can 
turn and say to her first-born and most illustrious child, ' Come ! ' 
[Hear, hear, applause, tremendous cheers, and uproar.] I will 
not say that England cannot again, as hitherto, single-handed 
manage any power [applause and uproar] ; but I will say that 



432 BIOGRAPHY OF 

England and America together for religion and liberty [a voice, 
* Soap, soap,' uproar, and great applause] are a match for the 
world. [Applause ; a voice, ■ They don't want any more soft 
soap. J 

Thus in the wildest confusion, little by little, a few sentences 
at a time, the speech was delivered. For nearly three hours the 
fight was kept up, until at last the speech was done. Although 
the mob was not quieted — it did not come there for that purpose 
— yet the speech was delivered, and, what was more to the point, 
was printed verbatim in the morning's papers. The mob wholly 
failed to accomplish their object. It did not break down Mr. 
Beecher. 

Four days later the concluding speech of the series was to be 
delivered at Exeter Hall, London. The great metropolis was the 
centre of political thought and influence. It was of great im- 
portance that the London speech should be a success, and to 
that end that the speaker should be in good condition himself. 

But the constant strain upon his voice in his efforts to be 
heard in the first three speeches, culminating in the prolonged 
struggle at Liverpool, where his strength had been taxed to the 
uttermost, had at last gone beyond even his powers of endur- 
ance. The day before the London speech his voice failed him ; 
by night he could not speak above a whisper. Voiceless, he was 
helpless. When he first realized the truth he was for a moment 
overwhelmed. To fail in London was, in very large measure, 
to lose the ground so hardly gained. 

" I felt all day Monday that I was coming to London to speak 
to a public audience, but my voice was gone ; and I felt as 
though about to be made a derision to my enemies, to stand up 
before a multitude and be unable to say a word. It would have 
been a mortification to any one's natural pride. I asked God to 
restore me my voice, as a child would ask its father to grant it a 
favor. But I hoped that God would grant me His grace to en- 
able me, if it was necessary for the cause that I should be put to 
open shame, to stand up as a fool before the audience. I said : 
' Lord, Thou knowest this. Let it be as Thou wilt.' " 

Rest being of the first importance, he retired early, and, hav- 
ing wrapped his throat in wet bandages, dismissed all further 
thought of the morrow and slept. 

In the morning waking refreshed, the first thought that came 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



433 



to him was, u Can I speak ?" For a while he lay silent, fearing 
the attempt. First he tried a low whisper, then louder, finally 
spoke out. His voice had returned, not in its old strength, yet 
strong enough to use. Now his exaltation was as great as twelve 
hours before had been his depression. 

The night came, and with it increased strength, fully suffi- 
cient for the work before him. 

In this speech slavery was discussed in its moral relations. 
Of the meeting we quote briefly from the published account of 
an eye-witness : 

" In the five great speeches which Mr. Beecher has made in 
England and Scotland on the American question, before vast 
audiences, he has taken care to observe a system of selection 
which has brought before the country all the great salient points 
of the American war. He has not repeated himself, but met the 
Confederate sympathizers here, upon every field which they had 
chosen for their own advantage. But the grand climax of all his 
efforts was that which was made at Exeter Hall last night, before 
a crowd as great as ever gathered into that immense hall, and 
which, despite the persistent efforts of the opposition to destroy 
the meeting and its effect, made a mark upon English opinion 
which must prove of the utmost importance. 

" Mr. Beecher's strokes in other cities of the kingdom having 
invariably drawn blood from the hides of the Confederate sym- 
pathizers here, it was plain that they had determined to meet 
with yells and uproar what they could not meet with argument. 
That an organized opposition was contemplated was not con- 
cealed. During all yesterday, posters were scattered through the 
length and breadth of the city, making all kinds of charges of a 
personal character against him, abounding in fictitious and dis- 
torted quotations from discourses and lectures delivered by him 
in old times. It had been considered of prime importance to the 
Confederate cause here that Lord Russell's assertion at Blair- 
gowrie, that the moral sympathies of the English people were 
adverse to the Southern cause, should be disproved ; and it was 
hoped, through personal assaults upon Mr. Beecher, to injure 
the effect of the meeting, and then claim it in as the verdict of 
London in favor of the Southern Confederacy. 

" At an early hour the hall was crowded to overflowing, and 
there was evidence, too, that they were orderly men and women, 



434 BIOGRAPHY OF 

who, whether sympathizing with the North or not, had come to 
hear a fair discussion of the question which concerns all, and 
were determined to secure fair play. The crowd outside in the 
Strand and Exeter Street was enormous, and consisted chiefly of 
the opposition. One of the committee came in smilingly, and 
said : ' Our shilling admission-fee has filtered the crowd. The 
Southern sympathizer is always a man who looks hard at a shil- 
ling before he parts with it, and then don't part with it.' Yet it 
was known that in two or three sections of the house there were 
parties who meant mischief. 

" When Beecher arose there were five minutes of the most 
tremendous cheering that I have ever witnessed. Wave after 
wave, as of a tumultuous sea of sound, came thundering up from 
the gallery at one end to the organ at the other, in the midst of 
which stood Mr. Beecher, calm as a rock in the midst of the 
surges. A hiss was then begun, but at his first word it sank 
back into the diaphragms of those who uttered or meant to utter 
it. The first glance and the self-possessed manner of the man 
told plainly that he had something to say in Exeter Hall that 
night, and that he meant to be heard. 

" Mr. Beecher's voice was scarcely as sonorous and clear as 
it usually is, and all recognized that this was natural after the 
many speeches in immense halls which he had given during the 
week. ' I expect to be hoarse,' he said, ' and I am willing to be 
hoarse if I can in any way assist to bring the mother and daugh- 
ter heart to heart and hand to hand together.' This sentiment 
was received with great applause ; and Beecher's hoarseness was 
thus impressed to the service of his cause. But he so econo- 
mized his voice that every word was distinctly heard by the vast 
assembly. And I assure you that every word was freighted ; in 
the day when men are called to give an account for every idle 
word spoken, Mr. Beecher will not be confronted by any one 
uttered last night at Exeter Hall. At one time, when there was 
an interval of a few moments arising from the effort of the hisses 
to triumph over t-he cheers, Mr. Beecher, with a quiet smile, 
said : ' Friends, I thank you for this interruption ; it gives me a 
chance to rest.' The hisses thereupon died away, and had no 
resurrection during the evening. It was evident, indeed, that 
the speaker, who knows a thing or two about audiences, felt that 
the meeting was his and that no interruption would succeed. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 435 

But many of his friends had serious apprehensions. One of the 
editors of the Star, himself a distinguished speaker, and tho- 
roughly acquainted with English audiences, who sat near to me, 
whispered in my ear : ' There are a great many here who do not 
cheer ; there is a strong chance of a row yet ; but the meeting 
is just in such a condition that its result will depend upon the 
power and equanimity of the speaker.' 'Then,' I replied, 'you 
needn't fear.' If Mr. Beecher had heard our brief whispers he 
could not have more distinctly appreciated the remark of the 
editor. At that moment, although he had been interesting all 
along, he suddenly stepped one side from the desk upon which 
his notes lay, and his face gleamed like a sword leaping from a 
scabbard. No more hisses, no more cheers, now for half an 
hour ; the audience is magnetized, breathless ; when the first pause 
came, a Sir Somebody, sitting behind me, said, ' Why, he looked 
at first like a heavy man, but he's got wings ' ; whilst a reporter 
near our feet whispered audibly to a brother writer, ' Oh ! but 
he can put things ! ' Mr. Beecher forgot all things but his sub- 
ject ; his tongue burned with living coals ; his arm pointed like 
a prophet's rod, The shams of our enemies in England ; their 
talk of peace when they mean every kind of bloodshed except 
that which is for justice — i the aspect of a lamb with the voice of 
a dragon,' as St. John saw it; their cant about emancipation 
being not a principle with Mr. Lincoln, but only an expedient, as 
if that would make liberty any less a prize to the slave and 
humanity if they got it — all these collapsed palpably before the 
masses then gathered, and all the fine points of Roebuck and 
Lindsay became toads under the touch of his flame-tipped spear. 

" ' This cannot go on,' whispered a clergyman near ; ' these 
strokes draw too much blood ; the victim is writhing in pain 
now.' 

" Again did Mr. Beecher level his lance ; it was at those who 
were making capital out of what they call ' American sympathy 
with the oppressor of Poland.' Nothing could exceed the droll- 
ery with which, almost blushing, he presented the loving and 
jealous maiden who, when her suitor is not attentive enough, gets 
up a flirtation with some other man. ' America flirts with Rus- 
sia, but has her eye on England.' Now, the presence of war- 
ships from Russia at New York has been the leading card of the 
Confederates here in their game to win popular sympathy for the 



436 BIOGRAPHY OF 

South ; for our friends among the English people are also the 
friends of the Poles. It was plain that the opposition in the 
meeting did not mean to let this matter pass without trying to get 
some capital. Consequently, when Mr. Beecher said, 'But it is 
said it is very unworthy that America should be flirting with 
the oppressor of Poland,' there were violent shouts, ' Yes, yes,' 
' Certainly it is,' etc. Mr. Beecher waited until the cries had en- 
tirely subsided, and a little time had been allowed for friend and 
foe to speculate as to his reply ; then, leaning a little forward, he 
put on an indescribably simple expression, and said mildly : ' I 
think so, too. And now you know exactly how we felt when you 
flirted with Mason at the lord-mayor s banquet.' I cannot at- 
tempt to describe the effect of these words on the throng. The 
people arose with a shout that began to be applause, but became 
a shout of laughter. The hit was so perfect and felicitous that 
roars of hearty laughter told that that topic was summed up for 
ever. Three loud groans given for the late lord-mayor — his 
place is now filled with a much better man — ended that scene, 
and the drama proceeded. 

" In the heart of Mr. Beecher's oration was given a denuncia- 
tion of slavery more powerful than I have ever heard from his 
lips. He scored and scourged it until it seemed to stand before 
us a hideous monster, bloated with human blood and writhing 
under his goads. 

" Mr. Beecher, having sustained himself throughout better 
than I had ever known him to do before- — and I am pretty famil- 
iar with his grand successes in our own country — having carried 
the meeting entirely and evoked the warmest expressions of 
good-will to America, sat down, leaving the audience hungry 
and shouting ' Go on, go on ! ' " 

London was captured ; the speech was discussed in every 
parlor and in every club. It was the topic of the day. Farewell 
meetings, veritable love-feasts, were held in London, Manchester, 
and Liverpool on the 23d, 24th, and 30th of October, and then 
Mr. Beecher sailed for home. 

That these speeches, delivered just at this time, in connection 
with the events at home, produced a marked effect cannot be 
doubted. They certainly cleared up many gross misconceptions 
that filled the English mind, and gave the English people a 
clearer insight into the real purpose of our government and the 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 437 

true object of the South. This seems to have been the judgment 
of contemporaneous opinion. A prominent English paper said : 

" Before he left England he had thoroughly enlisted the sym- 
pathies of the people with the cause of the North ; and he had 
no small share in averting a collision, which at one period of the 
Civil War threatened ominously, between this country and the 
United States." 

On his return to Brooklyn he was called to address two mon- 
ster meetings on his English experiences, one in Brooklyn in aid 
of the War Fund Committee, and one in New York in aid of 
the United States Sanitary Commission. In his introductory 
speech at the former, Dr. R. S. Storrs thus eloquently summarizes 
Mr. Beecher's work abroad : 

" We are here as American citizens all, to welcome one who 
has done to our country on foreign shores a signal service ! The 
rapid and private trip which he undertook, simply for the pur- 
poses of rest and recreation, was transformed, not so much by 
his own device or desire or will as by the persistent urgency of 
Englishmen, into a real international embassy of peace and good- 
will. And by consent of all who know, of all the interpreters, 
the advocates, the champions of our great national cause in Eng- 
land — of whom there have been not a few able and eloquent — no 
one has labored more faithfully, zealously, and effectively than 
he. . . . 

" W T e may gratefully recognize the kindness and the wisdom 
of that preceding preparation of both body and mind which 
fitted him for this work. The rest and leisure of those weeks 
upon the Continent prepared him not only to face the rough seas 
that have delayed his return, but to meet and master the more 
tempestuous savagery of the Liverpool mob. The Alpine peaks 
to whose summit he climbed contributed, no doubt, to lift him 
afterwards to the climax of his eloquence at London and at 
Manchester. And so it has come to pass that to him it is owing, 
as much, perhaps, as to any other one man on either hemisphere, 
that the mind of the great middle class in England — which is the 
mind that in the last analysis moulds and governs the government 
of Great Britain — is at least now partially informed concerning 
the principles and the history of our struggle ; that the war- 
ships framed by Confederate malice and commercial cupidity to 
harass our commerce, break our blockade, or desolate our cities, 



438 BIOGRAPHY OF 

are not to be left to step out to sea through any loose interpreta- 
tion of the law, but are to be kept chained to the docks and held 
there by the strong arm of the government, and that stars of 
promise are shining in the east, where lately the thunderbolts of 
war seemed to gather." 

At this same meeting Mr. Beecher himself gave an outline of 
the state of public opinion when he reached England, and some 
estimate of his own work in changing this public opinion : 

" I desire this evening to speak upon that which you all have 
come to hear — namely, my impressions and experiences in re- 
spect to the condition of things in Great Britain, as they relate to 
this struggle and this country. 

" There are many reasons why an American would have pre- 
sumed it easy to understand British feeling and British policy. 
There was a similarity of institutions in England and America 
and a sameness of radical principles ; but that very similarity, 
since it begets, through different institutions and different vehi- 
cles, different policies, is liable to deceive us. If I had judged of 
the condition of England from the impressions produced upon 
me by my first four weeks' tarry there in the summer, I should 
have judged very wrongly. You are aware that the original ex- 
pectation of our people was almost universal that in Great 
Britain we should find a sympathizer. One thing we counted 
sure, and that was that, if all the other nations stood aloof, there 
was one which would stand by us in the hour of our peril, and 
that one was Great Britain. And the sharpness of our retaliatory 
complaints was acuminated by that very disappointment of a 
very confident conviction. We never asked for help. We never 
asked that she should lend us anything, or stretch out so much 
as the little finger of her right hand. We did ask simply a gen- 
erous confidence and a generous moral sympathy, and that was 
all. I found, in the first place, on going there, that every man I 
met was a Southern man — not literally born in the South, but this 
is the designation they have themselves made. They are South- 
erners and Northerners even more than we are here. I found 
that on the railways, on the boats, in the hotels, and wherever 
there was a travelling public, there was a public that sympathized 
with the South and adverse to the North. 

:' The nobility as a class are also against us, though there are 
some very noble exceptions. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 439 

"In Parliament, if a vote were taken to-day according to the 
private thoughts, sympathies, and wishes among its members, I 
suppose they would vote five to one against the North and in 
favor of the South. It is believed, too, by those well informed, 
that at least a portion of the government have been entirely willing 
to go into a rupture with the North, and that but for the unflinch- 
ing restraints they would have done so long ago. But it is the im- 
pression throughout the realm that the sovereign of Great Britain 
has been from the first our judicious but our steadfast friend. It 
is believed, and so represented to me, that her never-rightly- 
estimated and lamented consort was our fast friend, and that 
among the last acts of his life were those which erased from 
documents presented to him sentences that would have inflamed 
the growing anger. And if you ask me what is the great under- 
lying influence that has been at work upon the upper class of 
England, I answer thus : 

w 1. Commercial interest and rivalry therein. 

" 2. Class-power and the fear of contagion from American 
ideas. 

" 3. (I know not how I shall say it so that it shall be the least 
offensive to our friends on the other side, but neither they nor 
you have come to the bottom of the conduct of Great Britain 
until you have touched that delicate and real foundation cause.) 
We are too large and strong a nation. 

"With this state of facts you will ask how it is that the Eng- 
lish people have been restrained ? How is it that they have not 
gone into overt belligerency ? That is the very question that I 
propose to answer, and in the statement that the English heart is 
on our side. The nobility is against us ; the government is 
divided and a part is against us. I think I may say that while the 
brains that represent progress in Great Britain are in our favor, 
yet the conservative intelligence of Great Britain is against us, 
and that all there is on the surface of society, representing its 
dignities, its power and intelligence, is anti-American. And the 
question I propose to you is, How, with the papers, magazines, 
and universities, how with their titled estates opposed to us, that 
they have been restrained from manifesting this in open hostility ? 
It is because there is a great underlying influence that restrains 
them — it is the influence of that under-life, and to a very great 
extent of the non-voting English, which has produced this effect. 



440 BIOGRAPHY OF 

It is a thing I could not understand at first, and which it is very 
difficult for us to understand ; for wherever in our country there 
is a majority of the votes there is sure to be a direction of affairs. 
But it is not so in England. I learned that the men who could 
not vote, where they were united and determined, had the power 
to control the men who do vote. I hold in my hand a letter from 
Richard Cobden. He says : ' You will carry back an intimate 
acquaintance with a state of feeling in this country among what, 
for a better name, I call the ruling class. Their sympathy is un- 
doubtedly strongly for the South, with the instinctive satisfaction 
at the prospect of the disruption of the great Republic. It is 
natural enough. But do not forget that we have in this case, for 
the first time in our history, seen the masses of the British people 
taking sides for a foreign government against its rebellious citi- 
zens. In every other instance, whether in the case of the Poles, 
Italians, Hungarians and Corsicans, Greeks, or South Americans, 
the popular sympathy of this country has always leaped to the 
side of the insurgents the moment the rebellion has broken out. 
In the present case our masses have an instinctive feeling that 
their cause is bound up in the prosperity of the States — the 
United States. It is true that they have not a particle of power 
in the direct form of a vote, but, when millions in this country 
are led by the religious middle class, they can go and prevent 
the governing class from pursuing a policy hostile to their sym- 
pathies.' 

" Into such an atmosphere and among such a people I went. 
And when, unsought, and indeed against my feelings if not against 
my judgment, I entered upon the labor of the past few weeks of 
my sojourn in England, I assumed the responsibility, I cannot say 
with trembling — for I am not accustomed much to tremble — but I 
assumed the responsibility with the gravest sense of what it was. 
I have felt the inspiration of nationality often, but I never before 
was placed between two such great peoples, where I saw them 
both in prospective, both in their present relations and in their 
future. I never before felt so much as I felt all the time, waking 
or dreaming, night or day, what it was to stand and plead for the 
unity of these two great nations, for the sake of struggling man- 
kind ; and it was at once an excitement to me and a support. 
But, after all, I did not know how my countrymen would regard 
my efforts. If you had disapproved I should have been sorry 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 44 I 

that you disapproved, but not sorry for what I had done. I did 
the best I knew how to do, every time, everywhere disinterestedly, 
for the love I bear to the cause and to the principles which un- 
derlie it. I did not hear from home whether my representations 
of policy, of fact, of history, and of the tendencies of things 
would accord with yours, or whether I should not be caught up 
in the whirl of conflicting parties, my reasonings traversed, and 
my arguments denied. When I landed in Boston I learned for 
the first time that my services had been accepted by my country- 
men. . . . 

" That to a certain extent my speeches produced among the 
common people beneficial results there can be no doubt ; but 
how far that extended, or whether they had influence upon the 
thinking classes, others could say better than I. They were 
certainly greatly aided by the fact that Lee was defeated at 
Gettysburg and driven back to Virginia, and that at the same 
time Grant received the surrender of Vicksburg. Those timely 
victories, together with other causes, held in check the man- 
oeuvres and diplomacy of crowned heads and made interven- 
tion less certain and more remote ; and gave time for Grant's 
success at Chattanooga, and his transfer to the Army of the Po- 
tomac, and in turn his promotion to general-in-chief of the ope- 
rations in the field. 

" I put no immoderate estimate on my services. I believe I 
did some good wherever I spoke. But it should be remembered 
that a single man, a stranger in the community, would be eaten 
up by vanity if he said or supposed, that he had done all the 
good that had been accomplished. There must have been 
preparation. He merely came to touch the train that had 
already been laid. When, in October, you go to the tree and 
give it a jar, and the fruit comes down all around you, it is not 
you that ripens it. A whole summer has been doing that. You 
merely brought down the fruit prepared. It was my happy for- 
tune to be there to jar the tree. The fruit that fell was not of my 
ripening." 

A few brief extracts from three of the leading papers in New 
York, published at the time, are quoted as indications of the pop- 
ular sentiment as to the value of his work : 

" It is plain, from the whole tone of the British press, that Mr. 
Beecher has been instrumental in starting, or at least hastening, a 



442 REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

complete revolution of the popular feeling of the kingdom in 
favor of our National cause. He is the man who ought to 
have been sent to England two years ago to enlighten and 
rouse the people. Had this been done he could have hardly 
failed of preventing a vast deal of that bitterness which has since, 
all the while, been fermenting between the two nations." 

" The Administration at Washington have sent abroad more 
than one man to represent the cause of the North and press it 
upon the minds of foreign courts and citizens ; but here is a per- 
son who goes abroad without official prestige, on a mere private 
mission to recruit his health, and yet we doubt whether his four 
or five speeches in England have not done more for us, by their 
frank and manly exposition of our principles, our purpose, and 
our hopes, than all the other agencies employed." 

" Every loyal American, whatever his opinions respecting the 
past words and acts of Henry Ward Beecher, will thank him for 
his work across the water. It is no exaggeration to affirm that 
the five speeches he has delivered — in Manchester, Glasgow, 
Edinburgh, Liverpool, and London — each pursuing its own line 
of argument and appeal, have done more for our cause in Eng- 
land and Scotland than all that has been before said or written." 

Whatever may have been the causes, it is historical that the 
English government, which had been trembling upon the very 
verge of intervention, withdrew from this project and began to 
entertain much more peaceful and friendly feelings towards the 
United States — feelings that have grown stronger and deeper 
with each successive year. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

Close of the War — Distrust of the Administration — Kindlier Feelings after 
Mr. Beecher's Return from England — Growing Confidence — Intimacy 
with Secretary Stanton — Fort Sumter — Lee's Surrender — Lincoln's 
Death. 

OX his return home from England, Mr. Beecher found that 
there was a marked change in the feelings of the Adminis- 
tration towards him. It was the popular verdict, in which 
Washington concurred, that the series of speeches just delivered, 
in conjunction with the successes of our armies in the field, had 
switched the English government off from the track leading to 
intervention and probably war, and had started it in the direction 
of friendliness and peace. Before that time he had succeeded in 
creating in the minds of the President and his cabinet a feeling 
which, if not hostile, was at least not friendly. With many 
things that had occurred or failed to occur during 1 86 1-2 and 
early in 1863 he had felt great impatience. He had had no sym- 
pathy with the feeling, that prevailed so generally during the first 
few months of the war, that it would be an affair of but a few r 
months, that 75,000 men would be more than enough to end the 
rebellion. He felt that the proper policy was for the government 
to crush the rebellion by the power of an enormous army, and 
that it was but poor economy to send forward troops by driblets. 
Nor did he at all believe in the distinction that existed between 
the United States regulars and the State troops. He thought 
that they ought to be all United States troops. What he felt he 
was not slow to say. On June 10, 1861, he wrote to the Presi- 
dent, urging the government to accept a regiment raised by Col- 
onel Stockton : 

" Ought not such a man as the one whom I send to you, Col- 
onel T. B. W. Stockton, of Michigan, a West Point graduate, a 
colonel in the Mexican war, to have a chance in this great war, 
with a thousand men at his back ? 

" Do we not need men that have seen fire ? 

" I am exceedingly desirous, anxious even, that a large de- 

443 



444 REV - HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

monstration of power should be made, as a matter of economy, of 
humanity, and of expedition. 

" Are we not in danger of being injured by a Northern mis- 
construction of State rights, which shall prevent government from 
taking troops where it pleases, without being obliged to come to 
the people through the machinery of State governments ? 

" // is the people's war. The people must be allowed to have 
a fair chance for the exertion of their will." 

And later, when political expediency was permitted to play so 
prominent a part in the selection and action of our generals, his 
indignation was intense and outspoken. While he felt great 
admiration for President Lincoln and great confidence in him, 
still he felt that he was making serious mistakes. As we have 
seen, Mr. Beecher was then the editor-in-chief of the New York 
Independent, and through its editorials he sought to rouse both 
the President and public sentiment. Speaking of this time, he 
says : 

"In 1862 the great delay, the want of any success, the mas- 
terly inactivity of our leading generals, roused my indignation, 
and I wrote a series of editorials addressed to the President " [to 
which we have referred and from which we have largely quoted 
in a previous chapter], " and as near as I can recollect they were 
in the nature of a mowing-machine — they cut at every revolution 
— and I was told one day that the President had received them 
and read them through with very serious countenance, and that 
his only criticism was : ' Is thy servant a dog ? ' They bore down 
on him very hard." 

Not unnaturally, neither the President nor his cabinet felt es- 
pecially pleased at this. They looked upon it as a hostile attack, 
and did not regard him with any over-friendly feeling. 

But in November, 1863, we find all this changed. The Admin- 
istration now could see in past criticism, not personal hostility, 
but an anxious desire, through love of country, to prevent mistakes 
and secure the best course of action. A far more kindly and 
confidential rel-ation was established, which continued through 
that Administration. When, in 1864, there was so much talk about 
compromise, Mr. Beecher went direct to the President and had a 
confidential talk with him, which he describes in a brief sketch 
(of Lincoln) : 

" There was some talk early in 1864 of a sort of compromise 




Mr. Beecher at the Close cf the War. 



445 



446 BIOGRAPHY OF 

with the South. Blair had told the President that he was satis- 
fied, if he could be put in communication with some of the lead- 
ing men of the South in some way or other, that some benefit 
would accrue. Lincoln had sent a delegation to meet Alexander 
Stephens, and that was all the North knew. We were all very 
much excited over that. The war lasted so long that I was 
afraid Lincoln would be so anxious for peace, and I was afraid 
he would accept something that would be of advantage to the 
South, so I went to Washington and called upon him. We were 
alone in his receiving-room. His hair was ' every way for Sunday.' 
It looked as though it was an abandoned stubble-field. He had 
on slippers, and his vest was what was called ' going free.' He 
looked wearied, and, when he sat down in a chair, looked as 
though every limb wanted to drop off his body. And I said to 
him : ' Mr. Lincoln, I come to you to know whether the public 
interest will permit you to explain to me what this Southern com- 
mission means ? ' Well, he listened very patiently, and looked 
up to the ceiling for a few moments, and said : ' Well, I am 
almost of a mind to show you all the documents.' 

" 'Well, Mr. Lincoln, I should like to see them if it is proper.' 
He went to his little secretary, and came out and handed me a 
little card as long as my finger and an inch wide, and on that 
was written — 

"'You will pass the bearer through the lines' (or something 
to that effect). 'A.Lincoln.' 

" ' There,' he said, • is all there is of it. Now, Blair thinks 
something can be done, but I don't, but I have no objection to 
have him try his hand. He has no authority whatever, but to go 
and see what he can do.' 

" ' Well,' said I, ' you have lifted a great burden off my 
mind.'" 

During the last year of the President's life they became very 
intimate, and the respect and admiration which Mr. Beecher 
shared, in common with the general feeling of the North, deep- 
ened into a strong personal love. In one of his Friday night 
prayer-meetings, shortly after Mr. Lincoln's death, he refers to 
their intimacy : 

" I am sure no one more than I, can feel the personal afflic- 
tion, outside of those that were immediately associated with 



REV. HENRY WARD B EEC HER. 447 

President Lincoln. I need not say to you how my public rela- 
tions have brought me, not only to the most constant study of 
his course and of his character, but into some personal relations 
with him that have given me more knowledge of him than other- 
wise I should have had. I was reading to-night, before I came 
here, the last letter that I received from him. It had reference 
to an interview which I had had with him on a particular sub- 
ject. It is a precious letter to me. During the time that I was 
with him (it was between eleven and twelve o'clock at night, in 
Washington) his great kindness, his great simplicity, and his 
great frankness opened him to me, and I saw him more fully 
than ever before, as very wise, as shrewd as well as wise, as far- 
reaching and sagacious as well as shrewd, and, above all, as 
faithful to the great interests that were committed to him. That 
interview has come up to me over and over and over again. It 
seemed as though it was but yesterday. And when the tidings 
that he was gone came to me, I know not how I shall describe 
the sense that I had of a strange personal loss." 

During this period Mr. Beecher formed the acquaintance of 
Stanton, which speedily ripened into a very strong friendship, 
largely through an impulsive act of sympathy by Mr. Beecher : 

" I came up Wall Street one day and met a friend, who said : 
' I have just come back from Washington. Stanton is breaking 
down ; he won't hold out much longer.' 

"Well, it just struck me all into a heap. I walked into an 
office in Wall Street and said, ' Will you allow me pen and ink ? ' 
and wrote to him just what I had heard — that he was sick and 
broken down and desponding. I wrote that he need not de- 
spond, that the country was saved, and, if he did not do another 
thing, he had done enough. I sent the letter, and in the course 
of a few days I got back a letter, and if it had been a woman 
writing in answer to a proposal it could not have been more ten- 
der. And when I went to Washington he treated me with great 
tenderness, as if I had been his son." 

From this letter of Secretary Stanton, which is before us, we 
quote : 

61 How deeply your kind note has affected me is beyond my 
power to tell. . . . The approbation, confidence, and sympathy 
of any man was never more highly prized than yours is by me. 
Your friendly words are a cordial that strengthens me, and your 



448 BIOGRAPHY OF 

kind sympathy will serve to dispel the gloom and despondency 
that, as you rightly judged, does sometimes, in moments of phy- 
sical weariness, gather upon my brain and press heavily upon my 
heart. Let me tell you that often and often, in dark hours, you 
have come before me, and I have longed to hear your voice, 
feeling that above all other men you could cheer, strengthen, 
guide, and uphold me in this great battle, where, by God's Provi- 
dence, it has fallen upon me to hold a post and perform a duty 
beyond my own strength. But, being a stranger, I had no right 
to claim your confidence or ask for help, and so have been 
forced to struggle on patiently as I might from day to day, sup- 
ported only by fervent faith in our sacred cause, and the con- 
sciousness that prayers were being offered up by good people 
for aid. Now, my dear sir, your voice has reached me, and your 
hand is stretched forth as to a friend, and henceforth I shall look 
to you and lean upon you with a sure and abiding trust. Al- 
ready my heart feels renewed strength and is inspired with fresh 
hope. There are some points involved in, or developed by, this 
present contest, on which I wish to commune with you before 
long." 

Early in 1865, and shortly after the surrender of Charleston, 
in reply to a letter received from Mr. Beecher making some sug- 
gestions, the Secretary wrote : 

" It will not be in my power to go to Charleston just now, but 
I would be glad to send you, and as many school-teachers as will 
go. . . . Your idea of rasing the flag over a colored school and 
making our banner the banner of civilization is indeed a noble 
one, and heartily my feelings respond to the suggestion. Soon 
after the 4th of March I may be able to go to South Carolina 
and do what may be done in that direction. . . . We received this 
morning the news of the capture of Wilmington yesterday. 
Surely the end cannot be afar off. The battle of physical force is 
nearly won, and now we must fight for civilization, including 
therein legal protection to the rights of all, and universal educa- 
tion. What of strength, heart, and hope is left to me I am will- 
ing to spend with you in that cause. Please let me know if you 
will go to Charleston without waiting for me. The sooner you 
go the better." 

Shortly after this it was decided to celebrate the anniversary 
of the fall of Fort Sumter (April 14) by an imposing military and 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



449 



naval demonstration, and by raising again the old flag over its 
parapet, and the project of sending to Charleston a delegation 
headed by Mr. Beecher was abandoned. 

As soon as the general plan of the Fort Sumter celebration 
had been decided upon, the President invited Mr. Beecher to be 
present and deliver the address. 

On March 27, 1865, the following general order was issued : 

" GENERAL ORDERS, ) WAR DEPARTMENT, 

No. 50. ) Adjutant-General's Office, 

Washington, March 27, 1865. 

" Ordered — 

"First. That at the hour of noon, on the 14th day of April, 
1S65, Brevet Major-General Anderson will raise and plant upon 
the ruins of Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, the same United 
States flag which floated over the battlements of that fort during 
the rebel assault, and which was lowered and saluted by him and 
the small force of his command when the works were evacuated 
on the 14th day of April, 186 1. 

" Second. That the flag, when raised, be saluted by one hun- 
dred guns from Fort Sumter, and by a national salute from every 
fort and rebel battery that fired upon Fort Sumter. 

" Third. That suitable ceremonies be had upon the occasion, 
under the direction of Major-General William T. Sherman, 
whose military operations compelled the rebels to evacuate 
Charleston, or, in his absence, under the charge of Major-General 
Q. A. Gillmore, commanding the Department. Among the 
ceremonies will be the delivery of a public address by the Reve- 
rend Henry Ward Beecher. 

"Fourth. That the naval forces at Charleston, and their com- 
mander on that station, be invited to participate in the cere- 
monies of the occasion. 

" By order of the President of the United States. 

11 Edwin M. Stanton, 

" Secretary of War." 

The steamer Arago was sent by the government to New 
York to transport the invited guests to Charleston. As soon as 
the formal invitations to the guests of the government had been 
issued and accepted, Secretary Stanton telegraphed Mr. Beecher : 



450 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" A list of the persons who have accepted invitations on the 
Arago has been forwarded to General Van Vliet. I do not ex- 
actly understand the extent of the accommodations on the Arago y 
but think there may perhaps be room for a few more ; if you will 
see him and find that more can be accommodated, you are au- 
thorized to fill up the number with such persons as you may 
wish to accompany you. On presentation of this telegram he will 
give them free transportation and subsistence as if this were a 
formal order. . . . Edwin M. Stanton, 

" Secretary of War" 

During this spring the Secretary was in constant telegraphic 
communication with Mr. Beecher, keeping him informed of each 
victory or successful move of our army as it occurred. 

This led to a thrilling incident in Plymouth Church. Dur- 
ing the month of March of this year it became very plain that 
the war was surely drawing to a close. Lee, hemmed in by 
Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, obviously could not hold out 
very much longer. 

The whole country watched and waited with almost breath- 
less interest as slowly but surely the end drew on, the intensity 
of feeling growing stronger as the end seemed nearer. It was in 
this condition of the public mind, and on Sunday, April 2, that, 
just after Mr. Beecher had finished his sermon and had given out 
a hymn, a telegram was handed up to him on the platform. 

Catching the feeling in the air that something of importance 
had happened, every eye was turned to the platform and a si- 
lence like death fell upon the three thousand gathered there. 
Eagerly the telegram was opened, and as the flash of joy lit up 
Mr. Beecher's face a thrill ran through the congregation, in- 
stantly hushed as he said : 

" The congregation will turn to ' America ' while I read the 
following telegram : 

"'War Department, Washington, 
"'April 2, 1865. 

" ' To Rev. H. W. Beecher, Brooklyn : 

"'A despatch just received from General Grant's adjutant- 
general at City Point announces the triumphant success of our 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



45* 



armies after three days of hard fighting, during which the forces 
on both sides exhibited unsurpassed valor : 

11 ' City Point, Va., April 2, 1S65, 

" '5.30 A.M. 

" * A despatch from General Grant states that General Sheridan, com- 
manding cavalry and infantry, has carried everything before him. He cap- 
tured three brigades of infantry, a wagon-train, and several batteries of 
artillery. The prisoners captured will amount to several thousand. 

" ' (Signed) T. S. Bowers, A. A. G. 

" ' Edwin M. Stanton, 

" ' Secretary of War.' " 

As he ceased speaking the great throng rose and, as one man, 
with streaming eyes joined in the triumphant anthem, 

" My country, 'tis of thee !" 

The organist drew the trumpet stops, and turned the full power 
of the great organ into the hymn, but it was drowned by the 
voices raised in solemn thanksgiving. Not a voice was silent, 
not an eye was dry. As the last notes of the hymn died out 
many a strong man dropped into his seat and sobbed with thank- 
fulness. The beginning of the end had come. 

On the 8th of April the Arago sailed from New York for 
Charleston. The day after she sailed came the surrender of 
Lee's army. 

Of course no word of the news was received aboard the 
Arago until she arrived off Charleston Harbor. 

"It was when I was tossing upon the sea," said Mr. Beecher, 
" off the harbor of Charleston, that we were spoken, and the tid- 
ings were communicated to us from another ship, ' Lee has sur- 
rendered ! ' And the wild outcry, the strange caprices and ex- 
ultations of that moment, they never will forget who were pre- 
sent. We were far off from the scene of war ; we saw no 
signs nor tokens ; it was as if the heaven had imparted it to us ; 
but oh ! what gladness, what ecstasy there was in that news no 
man can know but those who have suffered as we had suffered." 

Of his speech at the raising of the flag we can only quote a 
few brief extracts: 

" On this solemn and joyful day we again lift to the breeze 
our fathers' flag, now again the banner of the United States, with 



452 BIOGRAPHY OF 

the fervent prayer that God will crown it with honor, protect it 
from treason, and send it down to our children with all the bless- 
ings of civilization, liberty, and religion. Terrible in battle, 
may it be beneficent in peace ! Happily no bird or beast of prey 
has been inscribed upon it. The stars that redeem the night 
from darkness, and the beams of red light that beautify the 
morning, have been united upon its folds. As long as the sun or 
the stais endure may it wave over a nation neither enslaved, nor 
enslaving. Once, and but once, has treason dishonored it. In 
that insane hour, when the guiltiest and bloodiest rebellion of 
time hurled its fires upon this fort, you, sir [turning to General 
Anderson], and a small heroic band, stood within these now 
crumbled walls, and did gallant and just battle for the honor and 
defence of the nation's banner. . . . 

" After a vain resistance, with trembling hand and sad heart 
you withdrew the banner from its height, closed its wings, and 
bore it far away to sleep amid the tumults of rebellion and the 
thunder of battle. . . . 

" To-day you are returned again. The heavens over you are 
the same ; the same shores are here; morning and evening come 
as they did. All else how changed ! What grim batteries crowd 
the burdened shores ! What scenes have filled this air and dis- 
turbed these waters ! These shattered heaps of shapeless stone 
are all that is left of Fort Sumter. Desolation broods in yonder 
sad city ; solemn retribution hath avenged our dishonored ban- 
ner. You, who departed hence four years ago, leaving the air 
sultry with fanaticism, have come back with honor. The surging 
crowds that rolled up their frenzied shouts, as the flag came 
down, are dead, or scattered, or silent, and their habitations are 
desolate. Ruin sits in the cradle of treason. Rebellion has 
perished. But there flies the same flag that was insulted. With 
starry eyes it looks all over this bay for that banner that sup- 
planted it, and sees it not. You that then, for the day, were 
humbled, are here again, to triumph once and for ever. In the 
storm of that assault this glorious ensign was often struck ; but, 
memorable fact, not one of its stars was torn out by shot or shell. 
It was a prophecy. It said, ' Not one State shall be struck from 
this nation by treason. ' The fulfilment is at hand. Lifted to 
the air to-day, it proclaims that, after four years of war, ' not a 
State is blotted out ! ' . . . 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 453 

" Wherefore have we come hither, pilgrims from distant 
places ? Are we come to exult that Northern hands are stronger 
than Southern ? No ; but to rejoice that the hands of those who 
defend a just and beneficent government are mightier than the 
hands that assaulted it ! Do we exult over fallen cities ? We 
exult that a nation has not fallen. We sorrow with the sorrow- 
ful. We sympathize with the desolate. We look upon this shat- 
tered fort and yonder dilapidated city, with sad eyes, grieved 
that men should have committed such treason, and glad that 
God hath set such a mark upon treason that all ages shall dread 
and abhor it. 

" We exult, not for a passion gratified, but for a sentiment 
victorious ; not for temper, but for conscience ; not, as we de- 
voutly believe, that our will is done, but that God's will hath been 
done ! We should be unworthy of that liberty entrusted to our 
care if, on such a day as this, we sullied our hearts by feelings 
of aimless vengeance ; and equally unworthy if we did not de- 
voutly thank Him who hath said, ' Vengeance is mine, I will re- 
pay, saith the Lord,' that He hath set a mark upon arrogant Re- 
bellion, ineffaceable while time lasts ! . . . 

: ' That long night is ended ! And for this returning day we 
have come from afar, to rejoice and give thanks. No more war. 
No more accursed secession ! No more slavery, that spawned them 
both ! 

" Let no man misread the meaning of this unfolding flag ! It 
says, ' Government hath returned hither.' It proclaims, in the 
name of vindicated government, peace and protection to loyalty, 
humiliation and pains to traitors. This is the flag of sovereignty. 
The nation, not the States, is sovereign. Restored to authority, 
this flag commands, not supplicates. 

; ' There may be pardon, but no concession. There may be 
amnesty and oblivion, but no honeyed compromises. The nation 
to-day has peace for the peaceful, and war for the turbulent. 
The only condition of submission, is, to submit ! There is the 
Constitution, there are the laws, there is the government. 
They rise up like mountains of strength that shall not be moved. 
They are the conditions of peace. 

" One nation, under one government, without slavery, has been 
ordained and shall stand. There can be peace on no other 
basis. On this basis reconstruction is easy, and needs neither 



454 BIOGRAPHY OF 

architect nor engineer. Without this basis no engineer or archi- 
tect shall ever reconstruct these rebellious States. . . . 

" I charge the whole guilt of this war upon the ambitious, 
educated, plotting political leaders of the South. They have 
shed this ocean of blood. They have desolated the South. They 
have poured poverty through all her towns and cities. They 
have bewildered the imagination of the people with phantasms, 
and led them to believe that they were fighting for their homes 
and liberty, whose homes were unthreatened, and whose liberty 
was in no jeopardy. . . . 

" But for the people misled, for the multitudes drafted and 
driven into this civil war, let not a trace of animosity remain. 
The moment their willing hand drops the musket and they re- 
turn to their allegiance, then stretch out your own honest right 
hand to greet them. Recall to them the old days of kindness. 
Our hearts wait for their redemption. All the resources of a 
renovated nation shall be applied to rebuild their prosperity and 
smooth down the furrows of war." 

After the ceremonies of the 14th Mr. Beecher and his party 
spent two days in visiting the various historic points in the city 
and harbor of Charleston, then went to Hilton Head, where the 
steamer Sua Nada was placed at his disposal by the government. 

From Hilton Head Mr. Beecher and his party went on an ex- 
cursion visit to Beaufort. The day, which opened so bright and 
beautiful, was to close in the gloom which overshadowed the na- 
tion. The near points of interest about Beaufort had all been 
seen, and the party, full of the joyous brightness of the day, 
were sauntering back to the boat which was to take them to Hil- 
ton Head, when a telegram was handed to Senator Wilson that 
drove the smile from every lip. Lincoln had fallen, struck down 
by an assassin! Dazed and bewildered, for a few moments all stood 
silent; then Mr. Beecher exclaimed, "It's time all good men 
were at home," and in mournful silence they hastened back to 
Hilton Head. The Sua Nada was ordered to get under weigh at 
once. In sadness and gloom the party, that but a few days be- 
fore had left New York with hearts filled with joy and thankful- 
ness, now hastened back through dreary rain-storms — nature's 
sympathetic mourning. 

We can best describe that awful sorrow by quoting from Mr. 
Beecher's sermon preached in memory of the martyr : 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 455 

" Never did two such orbs of experience meet in one hemi- 
sphere as the joy and the sorrow of the same week in this land. 
The joy was as sudden as if no man had expected it, and as 
entrancing as if it had fallen a sphere from heaven. It rose up 
over sobriety, and swept business from its moorings, and ran 
down through the land in irresistible course. Men embraced 
each other in brotherhood that were strangers in the flesh. They 
sang, or prayed, or, deeper yet, many could only think thanks- 
giving and weep gladness. That peace was sure ; that govern- 
ment was firmer than ever ; that the land was cleansed of plague; 
that the ages were opening to our footsteps, and we were to begin 
a march of blessings ; that blood was stanched, and scowling 
enmities were sinking like storms beneath the horizon ; that the 
dear fatherland, nothing lost, much gained, was to rise up in un- 
exampled honor among the nations of the earth — these thoughts, 
and that undistinguishable throng of fancies, and hopes, and de- 
sires, and yearnings that filled the soul with tremblings like the 
heated air of midsummer days, all these kindled up such a surge 
of joy as no words may describe. 

" In one hour joy lay without a pulse, without a gleam or 
breath. A sorrow came that swept through the land as huge 
storms sweep through the forest and field, rolling thunder 
along the sky, dishevelling the flowers, daunting every singer in 
thicket or forest, and pouring blackness and darkness across 
the land and up the mountains. Did ever so many hearts, in so 
brief a time, touch two such boundless feelings ? It was the 
uttermost of joy : it was the uttermost of sorrow — noon and 
midnight, without a space between. 

" The blow brought not a sharp pang. It was so terrible that 
at first it stunned sensibility. Citizens were like men awakened 
at midnight by an earthquake, and bewildered to find everything 
that they were accustomed to trust wavering and falling. The 
very earth was no longer solid. The first feeling was the least. 
Men waited to get straight to feel. They wandered in the streets 
as if groping after some impending dread, or undeveloped sor- 
row, or some one to tell them what ailed them. They met each 
other as if each would ask the other, ' Am I awake, or do I 
dream ? ' There was a piteous helplessness. Strong men bowed 
down and wept. Other and common griefs belonged to some 
one in chief : this belonged to all. It was each and every man's. 



456 REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 

Every virtuous household in the land felt as if its first-born were 
gone. Men were bereaved, and walked for days as if a corpse 
lay unburied in their dwellings. There was nothing else to 
think of. They could speak of nothing but that ; and yet of 
that they could speak only falteringly. All business was laid 
aside. Pleasure forgot to smile. The city for nearly a week 
ceased to roar. The great Leviathan lay down and was still. 
Even avarice stood still, and greed was strangely moved to gen- 
erous sympathy and universal sorrow. Rear to his name monu- 
ments, found charitable institutions and write his name above 
their lintels ; but no monument will ever equal the universal, 
spontaneous, and sublime sorrow that in a moment swept down 
lines and parties, and covered up animosities, and in an hour 
brought a divided people into unity of grief and indivisible fel- 
lowship of anguish." 



CHAPTER XXII. 

Reconstruction — Mr. Beecher favors speedy Readmission — Soldiers' and 
Sailors' Convention at Cleveland — The "Cleveland Letters'' cause 
great Excitement. 

WITH President Lincoln's death the Rebellion died. A few 
fitful flames and a few smouldering coals here and there 
were all that was left of the great conflagration, but the 
Rebellion was broken and dead. In its death-struggles it struck 
one wicked, random blow, and left the victors mourning in the 
very hour of victory — never was so great a victory so sad and 
joyless. 

But the nation soon roused itself and turned to the solution 
of those new problems which confronted it. Through four harsh 
and bitter years, years of suffering, this peace-loving nation had 
been trained to war. Energetic fighting men had been pushed 
forward, by the necessities of the times, to the front, and put in 
command of national affairs. A vast army, trained tor fighting, 
was at hand. When suddenly the war was at an end, and he 
who with patient wisdom had stood at the helm, and guided the 
nation through such troubled seas, was stricken down. A new 
and untried man was, by virtue of his office, called to the head 
of the government. Armies were to be disbanded. The credit 
of the nation was to be sustained, and steps taken to meet the 
vast debt rolled up by the war. The problem was changed : in- 
stead of war was peace, disarmament, and reconstruction. Most 
serious of all was this question of reconstruction — what to do 
with the conquered States and conquered people. Having re- 
belled and led armies against the national government, the lead- 
ers had been guilty of high treason. What should be done to 
them ? Should they be punished, and, if so, how ? What 
should be done with the States? It had been determined that 
they should not depart from the Union. They were not in, and 
how should they be received back ? 

They had submitted, offered anew their loyalty to the gov- 

457 



458 BIOGRAPHY OF 

ernment of the Nation, and asked to be taken back again. The 
passions of a four-years strife, and such a strife, were slow to 
subside ; boiling blood cools but slowly. At first a strong feel- 
ing of resentment set in, and it was earnestly proposed to hang 
out of hand the leading rebels. Then they proposed to hang 
Jefferson Davis as a symbol of defeated treason, and so vicarious- 
ly punish the South. In time even that feeling passed away. 
But on the question of reconstruction and readmission the feel- 
ings of the Republican party leaders ran high. 

President Johnson, himself a loyal Southerner, was strongly 
in favor of readmitting the Southern States to a participation in 
the government (upon such terms as might be just), and receiving 
Senators and Congressmen from the readmitted States. To this 
plan Congress, which was overwhelmingly Republican, was bitter- 
ly opposed, and the result was the executive and legislative 
branches of the government divided one over against the other, 
waging a fierce and disgraceful fight — disgraceful alike to each. 
As in all other matters that affected the welfare of the govern- 
ment, Mr. Beecher was deeply interested in this, and lost no op- 
portunity to express his views from the pulpit and the platform. 

He was strongly opposed to any vindictive course, and when 
it was proposed to make an example of Jeff Davis he declared : 

"The war is itself the most terrific warning that could be set 
up, and to attempt, by erecting against this lurid background 
the petty figure of a gallows with a man dangling at it, to 
heighten the effect, would be like lighting tapers when God's 
lightnings are flashing across the heavens to add to the grandeur 
of the storm." 

On the 20th of February, 1866, at the Brooklyn Academy of 
Music, in answer to Wendell Phillips's lecture entitled " The 
South Victorious," given a short time previous, Mr. Beecher 
delivered a speech which he called " The North Victorious." In 
this he took a pronounced stand on the question of reconstruc- 
tion : 

" Each day will develop the prosperity of the South moving 
upon the new basis, and each day will make it plainer and plainer 
to them that nationality is necessary for their prosperity. Old 
aspirations must die. The war passion must cease. It is a new 
South we are talking about. It has a new political economy. It 
has a new future. God has said by the side of the sepulchre, 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 459 

1 South, come forth ! ' and the South has come, though bound 
hand and foot. Methinks I hear the Saviour say, ' Loose her 
and let her go.' 

" On the other hand, look for one moment at the effects of a 
prolonged exclusion of the Southern States. It is weaning the 
citizens of those States more and more from the national govern- 
ment. For five years they have not thought of Washington 
except to curse her. They have not felt the need of it. They 
have not felt any blood running through them that came from 
the national heart. It is proposed to make them live five years 
more out of the Union. Is that the way to make them love it ? 
Is that the way to make them feel their need of the government ? 

" The utmost evil in admitting them that can result will be 
that we shall be obliged to take a longer time to do some things 
which now we mean to do by legislation. Many of the things 
which we seek to accomplish by laws we shall be obliged to ac- 
complish by moral means. I have seen this anxiety to do every- 
thing by legislation, legislation, legislation, waiting for it, and I 
have seen the power of great moral causes. Although there is a 
wisdom in legislation which I would be far from invalidating, 
the forms of wholesome legislation, still I would balance that by 
the other consideration that it may take too long a time, and we 
may rely too much upon legislation. I rely upon reason and 
conscience. Churches are my congresses, and school-houses are 
my legislators. Kindness, equal, reciprocal, or identical in- 
terests — these are renovating influences ; and I would not wait 
too long for laws, which at best are but as mills which must run 
by some external power. What is a windmill without wind, or 
a water-mill without a stream of water ? Why put a mill upon 
the hill-top with a water-wheel, or in a valley if made with a 
sail ? What are laws without public sentiment ? They are 
water-mills without water, wind-mills without wind. We must 
fall back upon moral force. It may take a little more time, but 
we shall do the work more thoroughly ; and I believe we shall 
yet see the day when, throughout the South, they will show an 
enthusiasm for liberty, and schools, and churches, and colleges, 
such as we have never seen even in the North ; when every man 
shall sit under his own vine and fig-tree, blessed and blessing." 

Shortly after the assassination of President Lincoln he said, 
referring to its effect upon the South : 



460 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" I know not how this may turn, so far as the South is con- 
cerned ; I know not but that the cords will be drawn tighter 
than they would have been if Mr. Lincoln had been spared ; yet 
I am not without hope that those men who have for four years 
learned almost nothing but to curse the name of our beloved and 
now martyred President, with the beginning of better thoughts 
and feelings may, by sorrow and by grief, be led back again 
toward a national feeling. The North has been unified by a 
sorrow of one kind ; and I would fain hope that God, in His 
providence, will make use of this great affliction to produce the 
beginnings of compunction and the return of national feeling 
throughout the South. And so the death of Mr. Lincoln may be 
blessed to them as well as to us. 

" But, brethren, my heart goes out toward my whole country. 
I mourn for those outcast States. The bitterness of their de- 
struction ; the wrath that has come upon them ; their desolation 
— you know nothing of these. The sublimest monument that 
has ever been reared in this world to testify God's abhorrence of 
cruelty and rebellion has its base as broad as fifteen States. No 
pyramid was ever lifted up in such awful majesty as is the pyra- 
midal overthrow of these fifteen States. And I pray God that 
this last, crudest, wickedest offspring of the Rebellion may be 
an expiation through which they shall be redeemed. Christ, 
when He died, prayed for those that crucified Him, and instead 
of asking vengeance on them, said : ' Father, forgive them, for 
they know not what they do.' " 

Just before going to Fort Sumter in April, 1865, he said 
from his pulpit : 

" I would be no man's servant to go to add additional sorrows 
to those that already press and weigh down the South. ... I go 
to say to them, ' Sound government has come back ; beneficent 
government has come back ; the day has dawned ; and, as breth- 
ren to brethren, I come to bring you good tidings of great joy ' 
— a feeling that was more fully expressed in his speech at the fort. 

Shortly after "Johnson had been called to the presidential 
chair, and before the open rupture with Congress and his subse- 
quent extravagant follies, Mr. Beecher wrote him : 

" The two points that have lain most at my heart are : 

" 1. That the government should not allow itself, by any 
temptation, to invade the true State rights. The temptation is 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 46 I 

strong. But the precedent established might by and by plunge 
us again into great trials, and even conflicts. 

" 2. The other point is, the necessity of securing for freedmen 
the kindness and good-will of Southern white men. Their fate 
will largely depend upon their neighbors' dispositions toward 
them. Northern people nor the government can hold them up 
long if all the State populations around them are inimical. 

" In both these respects, as in others, I perceive that your 
sentiments are enlightened and statesmanlike. 

" May it please Almighty God to endue you with health and 
strength to complete the work which you have so auspiciously 
begun ! " 

By the autumn of 1866 there had grown up in the Republi- 
can party quite a minority, called " Conservative Republicans," 
who were opposed to the policy of exclusion ; and an effort was 
made that fall to elect Congressmen who would be in favor of 
admitting the Southern States again under such terms and re- 
strictions as might be deemed necessary. This feeling was quite 
^narked among the soldiers themselves, who, with the chivalry 
natural to bravery, were opposed to humiliating a conquered 
enemy. In September a National Convention of Soldiers and 
Sailors was called to be held on the 17th in Cleveland, Ohio, to 
give expression to this feeling. The preparatory committee sent 
to Mr. Beecher an invitation to serve as chaplain to the conven- 
tion, saying in it : 

" Your name has been selected by the Executive Committee 
from sincere admiration of your character, and as the only tribute 
within their power to pay in acknowledgment of your noble de- 
votion to the cause of the Union, and your earnest and unceas- 
ing efforts in behalf of our soldiers and sailors during the recent 
war. 

" The Executive Committee also find in your course since the 
termination of the struggle substantial harmony with the views 
to which they desire to give effect in the convention — your elo- 
quence and the just weight of your name being employed to en- 
force upon the country a generous and magnanimous policy 
toward the people of the lately rebellious States, and a prompt 
reconstruction of the Union under the Constitution as the best 
means of regaining the national tranquillity which the country so 
much needs, and readjusting the rights of all sections, under the 



462 



BIOGRAPHY OF 



new order of things, on a basis of law, order, Christian brother- 
hood, and justice. 

" In the call for the convention, which the undersigned have 
the honor to transmit herewith, you will see fully set forth the 
motives which actuate the military and naval defenders of the 
Union in their present unusual course of taking part in a politi- 
cal movement ; and it is our hope — as we have always looked to 
you in the darkest days of the war for inspiration, aid, and the 
cheering sympathy of a noble heart, never failing to find them — 
that you will consent to invoke the Divine Blessing upon the 
Convention of the Soldiers and Sailors of the United States who 
served during the late Rebellion, and who approve the restoration 
policy of President Johnson and the principles announced by the 
recent national convention of Philadelphia — the first convention 
since i860 in which all the States of our beloved Union were 
represented." 

As the convention was called for a time when he was pros- 
trated by his annual "hay cold," he was obliged to decline, but 
wrote to them what has since become famous as his first Cleve« 
land letter. 

This invitation, which seems so proper and natural to-day, and 
the letter in reply recapitulating the views which, as we have seen, 
had been expressed again and again in public, to the intense as- 
tonishment of Mr. Beecher produced a perfect tornado, and for 
a few days he was in the centre of a wild and furious whirlwind 
that threatened to destroy his influence in public affairs — then 
very great — and even to rend his church asunder. It seems im- 
possible, as we look back twenty years, to believe that such re- 
sults could have followed such a cause. 

It would seem, as we follow the exposition of his views almost 
daily on this subject, as though the public, and certainly his 
friends, would have become fully accustomed to them, and would 
have recognized the object for which he strove ; and the sudden, 
almost blind outburst of anger, indignation, and grief that fol- 
lowed the Cleveland letter, can only be explained on the theory 
that the course of President Johnson had so exasperated the 
Northern feelings, that the people, fairly beside themselves with 
anger, indignation, and suspicion, could see nothing right in what 
he did or advised, and would not permit any one to speak a 
kind word either for him or any of the views that he advocated. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 463 

Eighteen years later, looking back upon the accomplishment 
of that which he had so strenuously advocated, and seeing men 
commending as wisdom that which they had then condemned as 
folly, he recalls this incident in his life, which, like many others 
before and since, awaked the mournful prophecies of timid friends. 
From his Thanksgiving sermon, November 27, 1884, we quote : 

11 But one thing more was needed, and that was to chase the 
scowl from the Southern brow ; to revive the old friendship ; to 
clasp hands again in a vow of loving and patriotic zeal. It was 
given to us last, because it is the greatest of God's gifts. There 
never has been such a scene since the earth was born ; there 
never has been such a rupture, never such a conflict, never such 
a victory, never such a reconstruction, never such restoration of 
integrity in business, never such a reconciliation and gladness 
between good men on both sides, as come to us to-day. As yet 
the eyes of many are holden, and they cannot see how great a 
blessing God has brought to our unbelieving eyes and timid 
hands. From the bottom of my soul I believe in the honor and 
integrity of thoughtful Southern men ; and when I get from 
them such letters as I do, and hear from their lips such declara- 
tions as I hear, that they feel at last that they are in and of the 
Union, as much as we, and point to the flag, declaring, with 
tears, ' That is now my flag,' I believe it ; I should be faithless 
to God and to Providence if I did not. I believe it with an 
enthusiasm of faith, and with a longing heart of love ; for I 
think they are above hypocrisy or insincerity, and that, if we 
choose, the last cloud will rise from between us and then pass 
away for ever. 

" Moses, after forty years of toil, was allowed to see the pro- 
mised land from afar off only. Less worthy, yet more blessed, 
I am spared to go over with the rejoicing tribes into the land 
flowing with milk and honey. What am I, or my father's house, 
that to me should be given the privilege of laboring in all this 
drama, and seeing it end nobly thus ? The discipline is com- 
plete, and to the end of time this great epic of liberty, our strug- 
gle with slavery, will shine like the sun. 

" Not the least joyful element in this reconciliation is the 
assured safety and benefit which will accrue to the colored race. 
That has come to pass which was their only safety. Just as 
soon as the Southern statesmen accept the perfect restoration of 



464 BIOGRAPHY OF 

themselves to the great body politic, and find that there is no 
division, as between Northern men and Southern men, in any of 
the honors of government ; just as soon as they are in and a 
part of every administration — as, thank God ! they will be — just so 
soon of necessity that will take place which has taken place 
everywhere, in every community : there will be the party of ad- 
ministration, the ' ins,' and the party opposed to them, the op- 
position, the * outs.' The moment you have these two parties, 
each party has a sentinel watching it. In the South that will 
take place which is the salvation of the colored race. As long 
as they were a fringe upon a Northern party the South was con- 
densed and solidified against it. As soon as they are divided at 
home between the administrational party and the opposition 
party, they will be guarded and taken care of. The administra- 
tion party will not allow its voters to be injured ; the opposition 
party will not allow its voters to be injured. They will be dis- 
tributed as they should be, and the strength of each party in the 
South will be the safeguard of the intermediate voters. I regard 
this now, with schools and academies and various seminaries 
spread among them, as the final step of emancipation. 

" It is in these views that I have acted ; and in the calmest 
retrospect I now rejoice that I was able to act so. 

" The greatest mistake of my life has happened twice, as I 
have been informed. 

"I was in 1866 invited to act as chaplain to the convention 
called at the city of Cleveland, Ohio, of the soldiers and sailors 
of our army and navy. The object of that convention was to so 
shape our Northern politics as to bring the Southern States back 
immediately, or as soon as possible ; and in that general tenden- 
cy I sympathized. 

"The question of reconstruction of the seceding States 
was under discussion, and feeling ran high, not alone on ac- 
count of the nature of the work to be done, but also by reason 
of the disturbed relations between President Johnson and Con- 
gress. 

" President Lincoln had been assassinated, and Johnson had 
assumed his place. The statesmen whose vigor and courage had 
carried the country through the civil war were less adapted to 
the delicate task of restoring the discordant States to peace and 
unity than they had been to the sudden duties of war. 



REV. HENRY WARD BE EC HER. 465 

" In a general way there were two parties : one counselling a 
speedy readjustment, and the other a longer probation. 

" President Lincoln and Governor Andrew, of Massachusetts, 
in the last conversations which I had with them, inclined to the 
policy of immediate restoration ; and their views had great 
weight with me. It was in the interest of such a policy that the 
Cleveland convention was called. 

" My first letter was in reply to the invitation from the con- 
vention : 

"' Peekskill, N. Y., August 30, 1866. 
"'Chas. G. Halpine, Brevet Brig.-Ge?i.j H. W. Slocum, Major- 
Gen. j Gordon Granger, Major-Gen. , Committee : 

" ' Gentlemen : I am obliged to you for the invitation which 
you have made to me to act as chaplain to the Convention of 
Sailors and Soldiers about to convene at Cleveland. I cannot 
attend it, but I heartily wish it and all other conventions, of what 
party soever, success, whose object is the restoration of all the 
States late in rebellion to their federal relations. 

" ' Our theory of government has no place for a State except 
in the Union. It is justly taken for granted that the duties and 
responsibilities of a State in federal relations tend to its political 
health and to that of the whole nation. Even Territories are 
hastily brought in, often before the prescribed conditions are ful- 
filled, as if it were dangerous to leave a community outside of the 
great body politic. 

" ' Had the loyal senators and representatives of Tennessee 
been admitted at once on the assembling of Congress, and, in 
moderate succession, Arkansas, Georgia, Alabama, North Caro- 
lina, and Virginia, the public mind of the South would have been 
far more healthy than it is, and those States which lingered on 
probation to the last would have been under a more salutary in- 
fluence to good conduct than if a dozen armies had watched 
over them. 

" ' Every month that we delay this healthful step complicates 
the case. The excluded population, enough unsettled before, 
grows more irritable ; the army becomes indispensable to local 
government and supersedes it ; the government at Washington 
is called to interfere in one and another difficulty, and this will 
be done inaptly, and sometimes with great injustice ; for our 



466 BIOGRAPHY OF 

government, wisely adapted to its own proper functions, is utterly- 
devoid of those habits, and unequipped with the instruments, 
which fit a centralized government to exercise authority in re- 
mote States over local affairs. Every attempt to perform such 
duties has resulted in mistakes which have excited the nation. 
But whatever imprudence there may be in the method, the real 
criticism should be against the requisition of such duties of the 
general government. 

" ' The federal government is unfit to exercise minor police 
and local government, and will inevitably blunder when it at- 
tempts it. To keep a half-score of States under federal author- 
ity, but without national ties and responsibilities ; to oblige the 
central authority to govern half of the territory of the Union by 
federal civil officers and by the army, is a policy not only un- 
congenial to our ideas and principles, but pre-eminently danger- 
ous to the spirit of our government. However humane the ends 
sought and the motive, it is, in fact, a course of instruction pre- 
paring our government to be despotic, and familiarizing the 
people to a stretch of authority which can never be other than 
dangerous to liberty. 

" ■ I am aware that good men are withheld from advocating the 
prompt and successive admission of the exiled States by the fear, 
chiefly, of its effect upon the freedmen. 

" ' It is said that, if admitted to Congress, the Southern sena- 
tors and representatives will coalesce with Northern Democrats 
and rule the country. Is this nation, then, to remain dismem- 
bered to serve the ends of parties ? Have we learned no wisdom 
by the history of the past ten years, in which just this course of 
sacrificing the nation to the exigencies of parties plunged us into 
rebellion and war ? 

" ' Even admit that the power would pass into the hands of a 
party made up of Southern men and the hitherto dishonored and 
misled Democracy of the North, that power could not be used 
just as they pleased. The war has changed, not alone institu- 
tions, but ideas. - The whole country has advanced. Public 
sentiment is exalted far beyond what it has been at any former 
period. A new party would, like a river, be obliged to seek out 
its channels in the already existing slopes and forms of the con- 
tinent. . . . 

" ' I hear with wonder, and shame, and scorn the fear of a few 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 467 

that the South, once more in adjustment with the federal gov- 
ernment, will rule this nation ! The North is rich, never so rich ; 
the South is poor, never before so poor. The population of the 
North is nearly double that of the South. The industry of the 
North, in diversity, in forwardness and productiveness, in all the 
machinery and education required for manufacturing, is half a 
century in advance of the South. Churches in the North crown 
every hill, and schools swarm in every neighborhood ; while the 
South has but scattered lights, at long distances, like light-houses 
twinkling along the edge of a continent of darkness. In the pre- 
sence of such a contrast how mean and craven is the fear that 
the South will rule the policy of the land ! That it will have an 
influence, that it will contribute, in time, most important influ- 
ences or restraints, we are glad to believe. But if it rises at once 
to the control of the government it will be because the North, 
demoralized by prosperity and besotted by grovelling interests, 
refuses to discharge its share of political duty. In such a case 
the South not only will control the government, but ought to 
do it. 

" ' It is feared, with more reason, that the restoration of the 
South to her full independence will be detrimental to the freed- 
men. The sooner we dismiss from our minds the idea that the 
freedmen can be classified and separated from the white popu- 
lation, and nursed and defended by themselves, the better it will 
be for them and us. The negro is part and parcel of South- 
ern society. He cannot be prosperous while it is unprospered. 
Its evils will rebound upon him. Its happiness and reinvigora- 
tion cannot be kept from his participation. The restoration of 
the South to amicable relations with the North, the reorganiza- 
tion of its industry, the reinspiration of its enterprise and thrift, 
will all redound to the freedman's benefit. Nothing is so danger- 
ous to the freedman as an unsettled state of society in the South. 
On him comes all the spite, and anger, and caprice, and revenge. 
He will be made the scapegoat of lawless and heartless men. 
Unless we turn the government into a vast military machine, 
there cannot be armies enough to protect the freedmen while 
Southern society remains insurrectionary. If Southern society 
is calmed, settled, and occupied, and soothed with new hopes 
and prosperous industries, no armies will be needed. Riots 
will subside, lawless hangers-on will be driven off or better 



468 BIOGRAPHY OF 

governed, and a way will be gradually opened to the freedmen, 
through education and industry, to full citizenship with all its- 
honors and duties. 

" ' Civilization is a growth. None can escape that forty years 
in the wilderness who travel from the Egypt of ignorance to the 
promised land of civilization. The freedmen must take their 
march. I have full faith in the results. If they have the stamina 
to undergo the hardships which every uncivilized people has un- 
dergone in its upward progress, they will in due time take their 
place among us. That place cannot be bought, nor bequeathed, 
nor gained by sleight of hand. It will come to sobriety, virtue, 
industry, and frugality. As the nation cannot be sound until the 
South is prosperous, so, on the other extreme, a healthy condition 
of civil society in the South is indispensable to the welfare of the 
freedmen. 

"' Refusing to admit loyal senators and representatives from 
the South to Congress will not help the freedmen. It will not 
secure for them the vote. It will not protect them. It will not 
secure any amendment of our Constitution, however just and 
wise. It will only increase the dangers and complicate the diffi- 
culties. Whether we regard the whole nation or any section of 
it or class in it, the first demand of our time is entire reunion ! 

" ' Once united, we can, by schools, churches, a free press, and 
increasing free speech, attack every evil and secure every good. 
Meanwhile, the great chasm which rebellion has made is not 
filled up. It grows deeper and stretches wider ! Out of it rise 
dread spectres and threatening sounds. Let that gulf be closed, 
and bury in it slavery, sectional animosity, and all strifes and 
hatreds ! 

" ' It is fit that the brave men who, on sea and land, faced 
death to save this nation, should now, by their voice and vote, 
consummate what their swords rendered possible. 

" ' For the sake of the freedmen, for the sake of the South and 
its millions of our fellow-countrymen, for our own sake, and for 
the great cause of freedom and civilization, I urge the immediate 
reunion of all the parts of this Union which rebellion and war 
have shattered. I am, truly yours, 

" ' Henry Ward Beecher.' " 

This letter was published by the convention in the hope that 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 469 

it would make an impression on the public mind. It did. Their 
most sanguine expectations were more than realized in that re- 
spect. But it was a step in advance of the prevailing public 
sentiment, and, like such steps, was largely misunderstood or 
misrepresented. 

The partisan Republican press at once assailed Mr. Beech- 
er, some bitterly, some indignantly, and some compassionately. 
Read hastily, it was construed as a declaration against the Re- 
publican party and in favor of President Johnson, who by this 
time had come in violent collision with Congress and the gene- 
ral sentiment of the North. The President's course was re- 
garded as treacherous, and a feeling of hatred was spreading 
through the North, so intense that it was only necessary for him 
to advocate any measure to have it looked upon with suspicion 
and be bitterly opposed. Many of Mr. Beecher's personal friends 
were alarmed and distressed, fearing that he was giving aid and 
comfort to the enemy. He was overwhelmed with letters full of 
fear — fear for the country, fear for the Republican party, fear for 
him and his future usefulness. Some who had been among his 
intimate friends attacked him openly and fiercely in the public 
prints. The Independent, whose editorship he had but recently 
resigned, and to which he was still a regular contributor, in its 
leading editorial, from the pen of Theodore Tilton, attacked him 
with intense and persistent bitterness. Writing shortly after- 
wards to a friend, he said : 

" The rage and abuse of excited men I have too long been 
used to, now to be surprised or daunted. ... I stood almost 
alone, my church, in my absence, full of excitement ; all my min- 
isterial brethren, with a few honorable exceptions, either aloof 
or in clamor against me ; well-nigh the whole religious press de- 
nouncing me, and the political press furious." 

On the other hand, many thoughtful, earnest men agreed with 
the letter and commended it most earnestly. We quote from 
a letter received from Dr. Stephen H. Tyng as a type of this 
class : 

" I have just read your admirable letter in the Times of to- 
day. My eyes are wet with tears of sympathy and thanksgiving. 
You have expressed in terms and with beauty peculiar to your- 
self precisely what I have in my humble way thought and felt. 
. . . The recognition and establishment of our Union on the 



470 BIOGRAPHY OF 

basis of undisputed loyalty to the national government, un- 
limited liberty to the people, universal fidelity in payment of our 
responsibility, and generous reciprocation and acknowledgment 
of mutual kindness and confidence among all portions of our 
territory and all classes of our people, is to me the one great 
immediate end for us to strive for. I have not a doubt that all 
our interests and hopes, social, moral, and economical, are far 
safer in the union of our States and the complete acknowledg- 
ment of them all, than they can be in its refusal — nay, that they 
are safe in no other course. I cannot justify the partisan and 
acrimonious action which resists and impedes this immediate 
union. . . . The country has been much indebted to you for 
faithful and powerful defence, but it has never had more occa- 
sion to honor you than for the letter which I have read this 
morning. . . ." 

The reply to Dr. Tyng, written some days before the second 
letter, is valuable as showing how little his critics understood 
Mr. Beecher's position, and with what unreasonable and passion- 
blinded haste they jumped to the conclusion that he had aban- 
doned the Republican party, become a Johnson man, Copper- 
head, etc.: 

" Peekskill, Sept. 6, 1866. 
" My dear Dr. Tyng : 

" Your kind letter surprised and delighted me, and has been 
a great comfort withal. You perhaps are aware by this time 
that my letter has been excessively distasteful to the great body 
of men with whom I have acted, and to my own congregation. 
Nothing but a deep sense of public danger, to which the eyes 
of our best men seem blind, induced me to write it. The senti- 
ments contained in it I had, in speeches and lectures, openly 
declared in all the principal cities of the East during the whole 
winter and spring, and I was therefore not a little surprised at 
the wonder and excitement with which they have now been re- 
ceived. 

" I attribute it to the sharp issue made by Mr. Johnson and 
Congress, and to the exasperation of the public mind with the 
President, especially his most unwise speeches made during his 
present tour. I am far from being a Johnson man. I am an ad- 
vocate of the principles of speedy readjustment, without waiting 
for a greater but at present unattainable good. I am, however, 



REV. HENRY WARD BE EC HER. 47 I 

constrained to say that Mr. Johnson just now and for some time 
past has been the greatest obstacle in the way of his own views. 
The mere fact that he holds them is their condemnation with a 
public utterly exasperated with his rudeness and violence. The 
truth is, however, just as important as if it had a wiser advo- 
cate. 

" Things may go so far that no choice will be left but between 
a Copperhead Johnson party and a radical Republican, and I 
cannot for a moment hesitate on which side I shall be, or rather 
already am. 

" The moral sentiment of justice, liberty, and Christian pro- 
gress is with the Republican side. There are the men whom I 
most esteem, and with whom I have always acted, and for whom 
first and last I have wished success. 

" For that very reason I have desired and labored assiduously 
to secure to them more practical views than those at first pecu- 
liar to a few extreme men, but which, partly by the President's 
indiscretions, partly by the inflammation of the public mind and 
the adroitness with which things have been managed by a few, 
seem likely to become the enthusiastic belief of the whole com- 
munity, or of a large majority. I must submit to things which I 
cannot control. Should things turn out better than my fears I 
shall be glad to find myself a false prophet. But I confess that 
the cause of the freedmen, which lies near my heart, looks gloomy 
in the future. With a very South%rn South and a very Northern 
North I do not see but they will be ground to powder. But God 
rules — that is my unfailing comfort. His cause gains as well 
by disaster as by success. Good and evil both serve Him. . . ." 

On the 7th of September Mr. Beecher received a letter from 
Dr. R. S. Storrs, then an intimate friend, which expressed the 
feelings of not a few of his friends. In this he urged Mr. 
Beecher to make a fuller and more explicit statement of his 
position, and to show plainly that he was not in sympathy with 
Johnson, Seward, etc., in their general attitude. " A vast num- 
ber of people who have loved and honored you for years are 
really beginning to believe that you have gone over bodily ; of 
course all those who know you as I do, know this to be an 
utter misapprehension of your position." 

Many of the members of Plymouth Church shared the com- 



472 BIOGRAPHY OF 

mon misapprehension, while many saw plainly what Mr. Beecher 
was seeking, and sympathized with him. As a consequence the 
church was deeply stirred and in commotion. 

To quote again from Mr. Beecher : 

" Not many days after, President Johnson began that ill-fav- 
ored journey, known as ' swinging around the circle,' during the 
progress of which his temper, attitude, and injudicious speeches 
thoroughly alarmed the community. 

" It was believed that he was betraying the country, and that 
all that had been gained by the war was about to be lost by the 
treachery of the President. The public mind was greatly in- 
flamed, and my Cleveland letter was received with violent pro- 
tests. Many personal friends and members of Plymouth Church 
were greatly exercised. 

" There was a great pother made about that. My own friends 
were very hot. Some dove into the newspapers, some into let- 
ters. They flew thick and fast all around about me. Neighbor- 
ing ministers thought that I was unseated and disrupted for ever. 
In the midst of it all I knew I was right, and that if I had pa- 
tience others would know that I was right. And they did, 
though they still talk about that greatest blunder of my life, ' the 
Cleveland letter.' I am going to send down that document to 
my children as one of the most glorious things that I ever did 
in my life. But such was the excitement and clamor that I 
thought it wise to alleviate th^fear and trouble of my people by 
giving a fuller view of the ground of my first letter and to 
confute the idea that I had abandoned the Republican party, so 
I wrote the second letter to a friend to read to the church, 
assuming the same position, but with explanatory reasoning." 
This was the second so-called " Cleveland Letter " : 

We give a few extracts from this letter, which was a very long 
one, covering nearly the same ground as the first, only giving his 
reasons more fully: 

" Peekskill, Saturday, Sept. 8, 1866. 
"My dear ■ — : 

" I am obliged to you for your letter. I am sorry that my 
friends and my congregation are grieved by my Cleveland 
letter. 

" This feeling, however, has no just grounds, whatever may 
be the seeming. I have not left, and do not propose to leave, 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



473 



or to be put out of, the Republican party. I am in sympathy 
with its aims, its great principles, and its army of noble men. 
But I took the liberty of criticising its policy in a single respect, 
and to do what I could to secure what I believed, and still be- 
lieve, to be a better one. 

" I am, and from the first have been, fully of opinion that 
the amendment of the Constitution proposed by Congress, equal- 
izing representation in Northern and Southern States, was in- 
trinsically just and reasonable, and that it should be sought by a 
wholesome and persistent moral agitation. 

"But, from the present condition of the public mind and 
from the President's attitude, I deemed such a change to be 
practically impossible, in any near period, by political action. 
And a plan of reconstruction based upon that seems to me far 
more like a plan of adjourning reconstruction for years, at least, 
with all the liabilities of mischief which are always to be expect- 
ed in the fluctuations of politics in a free nation. 

" It is not the North that chiefly needs the restoration of gov- 
ernment to its normal sphere and regular action. Either the 
advantages of Union are fallacious, or the continuous exclusion 
of the South from it will breed disorder, make the future re- 
union more difficult, and especially subject the freedmen to the 
very worst conditions of society that can well exist. No army, 
no government, and no earthly power can compel the South to 
treat four million men justly, if the inhabitants (whether rightly 
or wrongly) regard these men as the cause, or even the occasion, 
of their unhappiness and disfranchisement. But no army, or 
government, or power will be required when Southern society is 
restored, occupied, and prospering in the renewed Union. Then 
the negro will be felt to be a necessity to Southern industry, and 
interest will join with conscience and kindness in securing for 
him favorable treatment from his fellow-citizens. . . . 

" Neither am I a ' Johnson man ' in any received meaning of 
that term. I accept that part of the policy which he favors, but 
with modification. I have never thought that it would be wise 
to bring back all the States in a body, and at once, any more than 
it would be to keep them all out together. One by one, in due 
succession, under a special judgment rather than by a wholesale 
theoretic rule, I would have them readmitted. I still think a 
middle course between the President's and that of Congress 



474 BIOGRAPHY OF 

would be wiser than either. But with this my agreement with 
the President ends. 

" And now allow me to express some surprise at the turn 
which the public mind has taken on my letter. If I had never 
before spoken my sentiments, I could see how friends might now 
misapprehend my position. But for a year past I have been ad- 
vocating the very principles of the Cleveland letter in all the 
chief Eastern cities — in Boston, Portland, Springfield, Albany, 
Utica, Rochester, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, 
and Brooklyn (at the Academy of Music last winter). These 
views were reported, discussed, agreed to or differed from, 
praised and blamed abundantly. But no one thought, or at least 
said, that I remember, that I had forsaken the Republican party 
or had turned my back upon the freedman. My recent letter 
but condenses those views which for twelve months I have been 
earnestly engaged in urging upon the attention of the community. 
I am not surprised that men dissent. But this sudden conster- 
nation and this late discovery of the nature of my opinions 
seem sufficiently surprising. I could not ask a better service 
than the reprinting of that sermon of last October, which first 
brought upon me the criticisms of the Tribune and Independent. 

" I foresaw that, in the probable condition of parties and the 
country, we could not carry suffrage for the freedman by imme- 
diate political action. When the ablest and most radical Con- 
gress of our history came together they refused to give suffrage 
to negroes, even in the District of Columbia ; and only in an in- 
direct way, not as a political right but as the hoped-for result of 
political selfishness, did they provide for it by an amendment of 
the Constitution. What was prophecy with me, Congress has 
made history. Relinquishing political instruments for gaining 
the full enfranchisement of men, I instantly turned to moral 
means ; and enunciating the broadest doctrine of manhood suf- 
frage, I gave the widest latitude to that, advocating the rights of 
black and white, of men and women, to the vote. If any man 
has labored more" openly, on a broader principle, and with more 
assiduity, I do not know him. More ability may have been 
shown, but not more directness of purpose or undeviating con- 
sistency. . . . 

" Deeming the speedy admission of the Southern States as 
necessary to their own health, as indirectly the best policy for 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 475 

the freedmen, as peculiarly needful to the safety of our govern- 
ment, which, for the sake of accomplishing a good end, incau- 
tious men are in danger of perverting, I favored, and do still 
favor, the election to Congress of Republicans who will seek the 
early admission of the recusant States. Having urged it for a 
year past, I was more than ready to urge it again upon the rep- 
resentatives to Congress this fall. In this spirit and for this end 
I drew up my Cleveland letter. I deem its views sound ; I am not 
sorry that I wrote it. I regret the misapprehension which it has 
caused, and yet more any sorrow which it may have needlessly 
imposed upon dear friends. As I look back upon my course, I 
see no deviation from the straight line which I have made, with- 
out wavering, for now thirty years in public life, in favor of jus- 
tice, liberty, and the elevation of the poor and ignorant. 

"The attempt to class me with men whose course I have 
opposed all my life long will utterly fail. I shall choose my own 
place, and shall not be moved from it. I have been from my 
youth a firm, unwavering, avowed, and active friend of all that 
were oppressed. I have done nothing to forfeit that good name 
which I have earned. I am not going weakly to turn away from 
my settled convictions of the public weal for fear that bad men 
may praise me or good men blame. There is a serious difference 
of judgment between men as to the best policy. We must all re- 
mit to the future the decision of the question. Facts will soon 
judge us. 

" I feel now profoundly how imperfect my services have been 
to my country, compared with its desert of noble services. But 
I am conscious that I have given all that I had to give, without 
fear or favor. Above all earthly things is my country dear to 
me. The lips that taught me to say ' Our Father ' taught me to 
say ' Fatherland.' I have aimed to conceive of that land in the 
light of Christianity. God is my witness that with singleness of 
heart I have given all my time, strength, and service to that 
which shall make our whole nation truly prosperous and glorious. 
Not by the lustre of arms, even in a just cause, would I seek her 
glory, but by a civilization that should carry its blessings down 
to the lowest classes, and nourish the very roots of society by 
her moral power and purity, by her public conscience, her politi- 
cal justice, and by her intelligent homes, filling up a continent 
and rearing a virtuous and noble citizenship. 



476 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" By night and by day this is the vision and dream of my life, 
and inspires me as no personal ambition ever could. I am not 
discouraged at the failure to do the good I meant, at the misap- 
prehension of my course by my church, nor the severity of for- 
mer friends. Just now those angry voices come to me as rude 
winds roar through the trees. The winds will die, the trees will 
live. As soon as my health is again restored I shall go right on 
in the very course I have hitherto pursued. Who will follow or 
accompany it is for others to decide. I shall labor for the edu- 
cation of the whole people ; for the enfranchisement of men 
without regard to class, caste, or color ; for full development, 
among all nations, of the liberty wherewith Christ rnake^ men 
free. In doing this I will cheerfully work with others, with par- 
ties — any and all men that seek the same glorious ends. But I 
will not become a partisan. I will reserve my right to differ and 
dissent, and respect the same right in others. Seeking others' 
full manhood and true personal liberty, I do not mean to forfeit 
my own. 

" Better days are coming. These throes of our day are 
labor-pains. God will bring forth ere long great blessings. In 
some moments which it pleases God to give me I think I dis- 
cern beyond the present troubles, and over the other side of the 
abyss in which the nation wallows, that fair form of Liberty 
— God's dear child — whose whole beauty was never yet dis- 
closed. I know her solemn face. That she is divine I know by 
her purity, by her sceptre of justice, and by that atmosphere of 
Love that, issuing from her, as light from a star, moves with her 
as a royal atmosphere. In this, too, I know her divinity, that 
she shall bless both friends and enemies, and yield the fullest 
fruition of liberty to those who would have slain her, as once 
her Master gave His life for the salvation of those who slew Him. 

" I am, your true friend and pastor, 

"Henry Ward Beecher." 

At the conclusion of his Thanksgiving sermon from which we 
have already quoted, after reviewing these letters, he summed up 
the subject : 

" My dear friends, if I had written that for to-day I could 
not have written it better, and I do not think it needs to be writ- 
ten any better. I stand on that, and I have read it this morning 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 477 

not only because inspired by the parallelism, but because it has 
been represented that my Cleveland letter was the greatest blun- 
der of the day ; and then, worse than that, that I backed down 
from it and retracted it. And I have read, therefore, both of 
them, in parts, so far as bears more immediately on questions of 
to-day, that you may know that God gave me the light to do one 
of the best things I ever did when I wrote that letter ; and that 
He gave me the grace to stand on it without turning back for one 
single moment ; and that He has given me grace to lay my path, 
by sight, along those two letters — hindsight and foresight — from 
that day down to this ; and that He has given me grace to with- 
stand the impleadings of those that I love dearly, not only of my 
immediate household but of my blood and kindred ; of those 
that are in the church, that are to me as my own life, and those 
that are of the political party with which I have labored thus 
far. 

'•'Still seeing that luminous light, as God reveals it to me, I 
have walked in it and toward it,- and abide in that same direc- 
tion to-day ; and, God helping me, so will I live to the end." 

To most of his friends the second letter gave great relief. 
The excitement in the church was quickly allayed, and, as it 
abated, the calm second-sight of his people began to see more 
and more in the letters in which they could agree. 

After the second letter Dr. Storrs wrote again : 

"Brooklyn, Sept. 10, 1866. 
*' Dear Beecher : 

" Your letter is admirable in all respects, and must make pre- 
cisely the right impression of your position and views on every 
one who reads it. Now let the winds * crack their cheeks.' All 
my solicitude is over, and Andy J. and Seward fully deserve 
what things they are going to get. 

" Most affectionately, 

"R. S. Storrs, Jr." 

In letters to prominent public men and journalists Mr. 
Beecher urged that the conservative Republicans should express 
themselves plainly and clearly for the speedy reunion of the loyal 
Southern States and restoration of a more kindly feeling, but 
that this should be done, not in opposition to the Republican 



478 REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 

party, but within it. He was emphatic that the work of recon- 
struction could not then be safely left to the Democratic party. 
As soon as the public began to understand, what one would think 
had been plainly apparent at the start, that it was not, and had not 
been, his intention to leave the Republican party, but to urge the 
party to take up speedy reconstruction as its line of policy, and 
that he was laboring to create a sentiment within the party in its 
favor, the general excitement began to abate, and soon the bit- 
terness, except with a few extremists, passed away. 

A few sparks which took their heat from this fierce excite- 
ment remained, however, smouldering unnoticed and unsuspected, 
to aid, a few years later, in creating the most terrible and fiery 
ordeal that ever a good man was called to undergo, since the 
time of Him who came on earth to give Himself a voluntary sac- 
rifice, that through His death the world might live ; whose ten- 
der kindness, patient forgiveness, and generous self-sacrifice 
were made the guide and rule of life, so far as human nature 
could, by him whose life we seek to portray. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

The "Silver Wedding "of Plymouth Church — Children's Day — Services in 
the Church— Reunion of old Members — Historical Reminiscences — 
Dr. Storrs's Tribute. 

AS in nature violent storms are often succeeded by peaceful 
calms, and as the sun shines brightest and the air seems clear- 
est and most purified after the thunder-storm has broken 
and passed away, so in Mr. Beecher's life we find that the stormy 
trials that beset him, at different periods, were followed by calms, 
in which the sun of popular favor shone the brightest ; by periods 
of peace, during which he seemed endowed with increased power 
for useful work. 

It was his lot to be generally a few years ahead of the times, 
but it was his good fortune to live to see his views accepted, and 
to find his hottest critics standing on the very ground, that they 
had so fiercely assailed him for occupying, but just a short time 
before. 

So, for some years after 1866, we find him working with in- 
creased power and usefulness in his church, from the lecture 
platform, and through the columns of the press. His church 
had never been more prosperous, his people never more active in 
all departments of good work ; never had he had so wide a field 
in which to labor. His sermons, which at first had only been 
printed in certain papers, were now issued in book-form, and 
were read wherever the English tongue prevailed. 

From his pulpit went forth words of cheer, of hope and love, 
that lifted up weary hearts, that infused new life in desponding 
souls, that shed a new light in upon spirits that had lived in 
the darkness of sin, throughout the civilized globe. His sermons 
were translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian. No 
four walls, no State boundaries, nor the limits of any one nation, 
held his congregation. 

In this period he undertook, in addition to his ordinary duties 
and labors, the principal literary work of his life, writing " Nor- 

479 



480 BIOGRAPHY OF 

wood," completing the first volume of " The Life of Christ," 
organizing and carrying on the Christian Union as its editor-in- 
chief. 

Though the shadows of the coming trouble began, during the 
later part of this period, to fall across his path, at times darken- 
ing and oppressing his inner life, yet to the world, to the church, 
and to his friends it seemed as if a lasting season of peace and 
prosperity had settled down upon Plymouth Church, and its 
pastor, promising many years of uninterrupted and blessed use- 
fulness. 

October 10, 1872, completed the full quarter-century of Mr. 
Beecher's pastorate at Plymouth Church. His people determined 
to celebrate in fitting manner this " Silver Wedding," as it was 
called. It was decided to devote the week in which the anniver- 
sary occurred to the celebration of this jubilee. 

In the minds of his people there might well have been some 
little feeling of pride and triumphant jubilation. They had seen 
Plymouth, from the little handful, twenty-one in all, whose or- 
ganization had awakened prophecies of a speedy death, grow 
to the great church of over twenty-seven hundred, with its 
three large Sunday-schools — Plymouth, Bethel, and Mayflower — 
the nurseries of the church, where nearly three thousand scholars 
gathered every Sunday to learn the way of life. They had seen 
its influence extended throughout the entire nation, throughout 
the civilized globe, a power for good. They had seen churches 
by the score spring from its loins, and not a few had they seen,, 
in periods of weakness when liable to fail, kept alive, nourished, 
and sustained by its strong hand until strong enough to stand 
alone. 

Its history formed a part of the nation's history in the dark 
days of slavery, in the struggle for national existence, and the ex- 
citing period of reconstruction, as has been well said : " For the 
better part of a generation Plymouth Church, under the influence 
of Mr. Beecher, has been a conspicuous light among the churches 
of the land. It has been the birthplace of countless good works 
which have blessed the whole community. It has been the nursery 
of noble impulses, of free thought, of patriotism, of generous and 
inspiriting actions. Its pupils have gone out into all parts of the 
country, carrying its fresh spirit with them, to infect other com- 
munities. Its influence is felt from Maine to the Pacific, and its 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 48 I 

memory is to-day affectionately cherished by thousands who were 
never within its walls and never saw its preacher." 

But in Mr. Beecher's heart, while not forgetful of the glorious 
record of his church, the predominating feeling was one of pro- 
found gratitude to God. 

In his Friday night prayer-meeting preceding the jubilee he 
expressed his feelings to his people: 

" If I thought next week was to be a kind of historical glori- 
fication of this church ; still worse, if I thought it was to be a 
sort of personal glorification, I should shrink from it with more 
than dislike — with positive loathing. It has pleased God to rec- 
ognize the instrumentality of this church in the work it has done 
for the last quarter of a century ; but, after all, the reason of its 
success, the absolute cause of its moral power, has been the pre- 
sence of God, and the preaching of the Lord Jesus Christ, here 
during the last quarter of a century ; and if we have a celebra- 
tion, it ought to be a celebration of what the Lord has done 
among us. The feeling ought to be that of gratitude, and of the 
most profound recognition of the goodness and mercy and lov- 
ing-kindness of our Lord and Saviour, who has walked in our 
households and in the midst of this artificial Christian family, 
and has not ceased to do us good, for the past twenty five years. 

"So, that all the services of the week may be infused with a 
more reverent and loving sense of the Lord's mercy to Us, I hope 
you will give yourselves to prayer in your closets and in your 
homes. May it be a week, not for the laudation of men or of 
churches, but for a grateful recognition of God's way with us, 
and of that dear name which should be dearer to us every day 
that we live, until we shall see Him in His glory for ever." 

Monday, October 7th, was the first day of the jubilee. This 
was " Children's day," the exercises being devoted principally to 
the Sunday-schools. 

In the afternoon the three schools united in one column and 
marched past Mr. Beecher's house ; as they filed by, the schools 
gave their pastor, as he stood upon his doorstep, a marching 
salute. Each child as it passed cast a flower at his feet, until he 
stood literally embanked in flowers. The day was wondrously 
beautiful, sunny, clear, and crisp — as though glorious October, 
nature's painter, catching the prevailing enthusiasm, was con- 
sciously contributing its share to make the occasion a success. 



482 BIOGRAPHY OF 

Mr. Beecher was deeply touched. "We gave Monday to the 
children — and a beautiful day it was — and a sight brighter than 
which I shall not see until I look in the New Jerusalem, and see 
all the children who have left us for that better land." 

Tuesday, as " Teachers' day," was devoted to a reunion of 
the teachers and officers then serving or who had done duty in 
either of the three Sunday-schools. 

Wednesday, as " Members' day," was like a great family re- 
union : it was the home day. 

The church auditorium, the lecture-room and Sunday-school 
rooms, decorated with flowers, were thrown open to the mem- 
bers. We quote a description of the decorations : " What with 
the warbling of sweet-voiced birds, the profusion of leafy and 
floral decorations artistically arranged, the many beautiful paint- 
ings, the liquid, melodious strains from a band of musicians with 
stringed instruments stationed in the gallery, the picturesque 
though sober dresses of the lady-promenaders, but, above all, the 
vocal sound of animated, sparkling conversation, a kaleidoscopic 
picture was presented which awakened and gratified all the 
senses, and which, however, could only be appreciated by an 
eye-witness." 

The exercises were eminently social, a part of the evening 
being devoted to humorous reminiscences, by the older members, 
of the "early days." Music and a lunch helped to increase the 
general enjoyment. 

Thursday, " Historical day," was, more perhaps than any 
other, a public day. As the name indicates, it was devoted to a 
review of the church, its growth in size, in works, and its ever- 
extending influence for good. From Mr. Beecher's speech we 
give only the opening and closing paragraphs, which briefly 
review the beginning of his pastorate in Plymouth Church, his 
purpose in his work, and its continuance to that time : 

" At my first coming I had no plans ; I had marked out no 
future ; I had no theories to establish, no system to found, no 
doctrines to demolish, no oppugnation of any kind. I remember 
distinctly that over and over again I held account with myself ; 
and I came into this field simply and only to work for the awak- 
ening of men, for their conversion to Christ, and for their up- 
building in a Christian life. I had almost a species of indiffer- 
ence as to means and measures. I cared little, and perhaps too 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 483 

little, whether I had or had not a church-building. I thought of 
one thing — the love of Christ to men. This, to me, was a burning 
reality. Less clearly than now, perhaps, did I discern the whole 
circuit and orb of the nature of Christ ; but with a burning in- 
tensity I realized the love of God in Jesus Christ. I believed it 
to be the one transcendent influence in this world by which men 
should be roused to a higher manhood, and should be translated 
into another and better kingdom. My purpose was to preach 
Christ to men for the sake of bringing them to a higher life. 
And though I preferred the polity and economy of the Congre- 
gational Church, yet I also felt that God was in all the other 
churches, and that it was no part of my ministry to build up sec- 
tarian walls ; that it was no part of my ministry to bombard and 
pull down sectarian structures ; but that the work of my ministry 
was to find the way to the hearts of men, and to labor with them 
for their awakening, and conversion, and sanctification. 

" I have said that I had no theory ; but I had a very strong 
impression on my mind that the first five years in the life of a 
church would determine the history of that church and give to 
it its position and genius ; that if the earliest years of a church 
were controversial or barren it would take scores of years to 
right it, but that if a church were consecrated, and active, and 
energetic during the first five years of its life, it would probably 
go on through generations developing the same features. My 
supreme anxiety, therefore, in gathering a church, was to have 
all of its members united in a fervent, loving disposition ; to 
have them all in sympathy with men ; and to have all of them 
desirous of bringing to bear the glorious truths of the Gospel 
upon the hearts and consciences of those about them. . . ." 

" I bless God when I look back. I have lived my life, and 
no man can take it from me. The mistakes that I have made — 
and they are many — none know so well as I. My incapacity 
and insufficiency none can feel so profoundly as I. ... And 
yet I have this witness : that for twenty-five years I have 
not withheld my strength, and have labored in simplicity and 
with sincerity of motive for the honor of my God, and for the 
love that I bear to you, and for the ineradicable love that I have 
for my country and for the world. 

" My time is drawing near ; but if I should fall to-morrow, 
I have lived. I have seen this land rise up from its drunkenness 



484 BIOGRAPHY OF 

and its shame. I have seen the original principles of liberty,, 
which had well-nigh been buried, come like Lazarus forth from 
the grave. What if, for the first few steps of the new life — bound 
hand and foot in grave-clothes, and with a napkin about his 
head, staggering somewhat — it knew not how to find the rightful 
path ? Our country is free ; and it has pleased God to give you 
and me some part in the work of enfranchisement and the settle- 
ment of this land on the old foundation of truth and justice and 
universal liberty. 

" I have lived through a quarter of a century, and had a free 
platform ; and you have sustained me in speaking just what I 
thought to be true. You have never servilely believed anything 
because I said it ; for you have maintained opinions different 
from mine from the beginning to the end. . . . 

" I am admonished that the best of my years are past 
and that my sun will soon go down. Let it go down to-day, 
to-morrow, whenever it may please God. I will not ask for the 
lengthening out of one single day. I have lived a happy life. I 
have been a happy pastor. I have loved you and been beloved 
by you. I have seen your children come up and walk in the 
ways of life. I have gone down with hundreds to see the frame- 
work laid in the dust, believing that the spirit was above. • We 
have come down together, without a quarrel, without a break, 
and without a shaking of confidence, to this blessed hour. And 
now, in these closing words which I address to you and to all 
who are present, join with me, not in self-gratulation, nor in the 
interchange of compliments, but in thanksgiving to Christ that 
has loved us, to the Spirit of God that has inspired us, and to 
the dear Father that has kept us together in the one household 
of faith, beloved and loving, thus far." 

Twenty-five years before Dr. Storrs gave the right hand of 
fellowship to Mr. Beecher at his installation, then to encourage 
him to future labor. Again he gives him the hand of fellowship, 
but now, in words tender and eloquent, to dwell on the work 
done, to congratul-ate him on the rich and abundant harvest he 
had garnered, and to testify his brotherly love and admiration. 
The scene was a solemnly touching one, as Dr. Storrs, in the 
words we quote, closed his glowing tribute to the man who, for 
twenty-five years, had stood by his side laboring for a common 
cause, and who had loved him as a brother : 



2 p. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 48 

" At any rate, we have stood side by side in all these years ; 
and they have been wonderful and eventful years. 

11 ' Our eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, 

When He loosed the fateful lightnings of His terrible swift sword, 
And His truth went marching on ! ' 

" We have differed many times, but two men so unlike never 
stood side by side with each other, for so long a time, in more 
perfect harmony, without a jealousy or a jar ! Though we have 
differed in opinion, we have never differed in feeling. We have 
walked to the graves of friends in company. We have sat at the 
table of the Lord in company. He knows, as he has said, that 
when other voices were loud and fierce in hostility to him mine 
never joined them. When other pens wrote his name, dropping 
gall and venom as they wrote it, my pen never touched the paper 
except in honor and admiration of him. And / know that when- 
ever I have wanted counsel or courage given me from others, he 
has always been ready, from the overflowing surplus of his sur- 
charged mind, to give them to me. 

" So we have stood side by side — blessed be God ! — in no spirit 
but of fraternal love, for that long space of twenty-five years 
which began with the Right Hand of Fellowship then, and closes 
before you here to-night. 

" I am not here, my friends, to repeat the service which then 
I performed. It would be superfluous. When I think of the 
great assemblies that have surged and thronged around this plat- 
form, when I think of the influences that have gone out from 
this pulpit into all the earth, I feel that less than almost any 
other man on earth does he need the assurance of fellowship 
from any but the Son of God ! But I am here to-night for an- 
other and a different service ! On behalf of you who tarry, and 
of those who have ascended from this congregation ; on behalf 
of Christians of every name throughout our city, who have had 
such joy and pride in him, and the name of whose town has, by 
him, been made famous in the earth ; on behalf of all our 
churches, now growing to be an army ; on behalf of those in 
every part of our land who have never seen his face or heard his 
voice, but who have read and loved his sermons, and been quick- 
ened and blessed by them ; on behalf of the great multitudes 



486 BIOGRAPHY OF 

who have gone up from every land which his sermons have 
reached — never having touched his hand on earth, but waiting 
to greet him by and by — I am here to-night [taking Mr. Beecher 
by the hand] to give him the Right Hand of Congratulation, on 
the closing of this twenty-fifth year of his ministry, and to say : 
God be praised for all the work that you have done here ! God 
be praised for the generous gifts which He has showered upon 
you, and the generous use which you have made of them, here 
and elsewhere, and everywhere in the land ! God give you 
many happy and glorious years of work and joy still to come in 
your ministry on earth ! May your soul, as the years go on, be 
whitened more and more in the radiance of God's light, and in 
the sunshine of His love ! And, when the end comes — as it will 
— may the gates of pearl swing inward for your entrance, before 
the hands of those who have gone up before you, and who now 
wait to welcome you thither ; and then may there open to you 
that vast and bright Eternity — all vivid with God's love — in 
which an instant vision shall be perfect joy, and an immortal 
labor shall be to you immortal rest !" 

"This magnificent concluding passage," said the Brooklyn 
Union of the next day, "was uttered with an eloquence that 
defies description. At its conclusion Mr. Beecher, with tears, 
and trembling from head to foot, arose, and, placing his hand on 
Dr. Storrs's shoulder, kissed him upon the cheek. The congrega- 
tion sat for a moment breathless and enraptured with this simple 
and beautiful action. Then there broke from them such a burst 
of applause as never before was heard in an ecclesiastical edifice. 
There was not a dry eye in the house." 

Friday, " Communion day," ended the jubilee. After a brief 
season of prayer and remarks, the solemn service of the Lord's 
Supper closed the meeting, over two thousand persons partici- 
pating in the communion. 

The week was a blessed one for pastor and people, making 
stronger the bonds of love, confidence, and mutual trust that 
united them into a single church, and, no doubt, helped and 
strengthened both in the crossing of that stormy sea of trouble, 
at the very shore of which they were then standing. 

Little could the people of Plymouth Church foresee as they 
crowded around their pastor, striving, in loving emulation, to out- 
do each other in marks of affection and confidence, that the most 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 487 

infamous conspiracy of modern times was rapidly involving 
pastor and church in a network of wicked lies. 

None would have believed in those happy days that the very 
men who owed most to their pastor, who had received at his 
hands aid and comfort when most needed, whom he had nurtured 
and strengthened by his love, were using the very power they 
had derived through him, to destroy their benefactor; with the 
malignant ingenuity of the fallen angel, were weaving webs of 
falsehood and misrepresentation about his feet, working on his 
feelings, ever sensitive to any neglect of duty upon his part, by 
false statements of injury done by his thoughtlessness or neglect; 
cunningly interweaving his exaggerated outbursts of self-accusing 
grief with their falsehoods, prepared by them, with cool delibera- 
tion, to fit his words. They sought by his very horror of evil to 
give the appearance of evil. Closing his mouth by a pledge they 
well knew his honor would observe, they, disregarding their 
pledges, by busy whisperings strove to fasten suspicion on him, 
who, they knew, would not speak in self-defence. 

The warmth of that heart that loved all mankind, that bore 
malice to none, but sought by greater loving-kindness to over- 
come enmity, returning good for evil, fell upon a serpent's nest, 
warming into life the malignant, venomous brood, the intensity 
of whose desire to injure seemed in the proportion that each had 
been benefited. The eggs had hatched, and the serpents were 
daily growing stronger and more dangerous. 

But least of all did Plymouth Church suspect that those 
whose hands they had just grasped in fraternal love, who, by 
their own teachings and their calling, should have been slow to 
believe evil of their brethren, would in a few short weeks join 
hands with her bitterest enemies, lending to them the moral sup- 
port of their own blameless lives and high reputations, giving 
them advice, aid, and comfort, opening their churches as an asy- 
lum to the discontented and treacherous in Plymouth Church ; 
and, even while the words of brotherly love and deep, abiding 
confidence, just flown from their lips, were ringing with joy and 
comfort in the heart of their brother, would lend the ears of 
ready listeners, to the base tales of baser men — men whom they 
themselves knew to be tainted in honor and morals — holding 
their cloaks to screen the would-be assassins. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

The Conspiracy — Relations with Mr. Bowen— Disputes and Arbitration- 
Theodore Tilton's Early Promise and Intimacy with Mr. Beecher — 
Bowen's Ill-Will and Tilton's Malice — Tilton discharged from Inde- 
pendent and Brooklyn Union — Tripartite Agreement — Moulton and 
Tilton conspire to Blackmail Mr. Beecher — Tilton consults Dr. 
Storrs. 

WHILE it will not be possible in the space of a volume such 
as this, nor at all desirable if it were possible, to go to 
any considerable extent into the details of that experience 
in Mr. Beecher's life, commonly called " the Scandal," yet no 
biography would be complete or truthful which ignored this 
period. 

Therefore, while we avoid all those details likely to offend 
against a rational public sentiment, we shall try to give such an 
outline of the general facts as may be necessary for a clear un- 
derstanding of this monstrous conspiracy. 

To do this we must necessarily go back to the beginnings, 
some of which exerted a powerful, influence on subsequent 
events. In 1856 Mr. Beecher was invited to become a contribu- 
tor to the Independent, then published and controlled by Henry 
C. Bowen and his partner, Mr. McNamee. This was accepted, 
and in November of that year a contract was made between 
them to that effect. 

This contract, with a few subsequent modifications, remained 
in force until the year 1 860, when a new one was made by which 
Mr. Beecher became the editor-in-chief, Theodore Tilton, .his as- 
sistant, relieving Trim wholly of the office routine work. Mr. Til- 
ton was at this time a young man with the promise of a brilliant 
future before him. Determining upon journalism and public 
speaking as his profession, he sought to familiarize himself with 
the speeches and writings of those most prominent in his chosen 

field. Early in the " Fifties " he began reporting Mr. Beecher's 

488 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 489 

sermons for the Observer. This led to an acquaintance between 
them. 

Tilton, though scarcely more than a boy, was even then very 
•clever. His bright speeches, his boyish enthusiasm in following 
out the high purposes he had formed, the really manly aspira- 
tions he then felt, and, above all, his sunny disposition, soon won 
tor him a very warm place in Mr. Beecher's heart, which he 
only lost years later, when his uncontrollable egotism and vanity 
— the mildew of precocity — worked his destruction, wrecking his 
reputation, his morals, and his life. 

Mr. Beecher delighted in aiding and promoting him, seeking 
by wise counsels to strengthen every good quality and to hold 
in check every malign tendency, advancing him as rapidly as 
possible in his profession. All this Mr. Tilton fully recognized, 
writing Mr. Beecher, a short time before he began his plotting : 

" My Friend : From my boyhood up you have been to me 
what no other man has been, what no other man can be. While 
I was a student the influence of your mind on mine was greater 
than all books and all teachers. The intimacy with which you 
honored me for twelve years has been, next to my wife and fam- 
ily, the chief affection of my life. By you I was baptized ; 
by you married ; you are my minister, teacher, father, brother, 
friend, companion. The debt I owe you I can never pay. My 
religious life, my intellectual development, my open door of op- 
portunity for labor, my public reputation — all these, my dear 
friend, I owe in so great a degree to your own kindness that 
my gratitude cannot be written in words, but must be expressed 
only in love." 

Early in their intimacy Tilton left the Observer and joined 
his fortunes to the Independent. 

Through the affection and influence of his friend he was 
advanced steadily, until, in the fall of i860 or early 1861, he 
was made assistant editor. In the spring of 1861 occurred an 
incident that was to produce ultimately no little trouble. 

Mr. Beecher had from time to time bought, from Mr. Bowen's 
dry-goods store, various articles to be sent to the Brooklyn 
Phalanx, a regiment largely enrolled from the youths and friends 
of Plymouth Church, and in which Mr. Beecher's eldest son was 
an officer. These purchases were charged against Mr. Beecher's 
salary account. In May, 1861, Mr. Bowen claimed that Mr. 



490 BIOGRAPHY OF 

Beecher's account had been very greatly overdrawn, by goods 
purchased and money drawn out. The matter was finally arbi- 
trated, the arbitrator awarding Mr. Bowen $1,000, which was 
paid. 

Whether it was the failure to receive all that he expected, or 
some other and unknown grievance, we cannot say, but from 
about this time began a feeling of hostility on the part of Mr. 
Bowen, which a few years later, after Mr. Beecher had finally left 
the Independent, took shape in scandalous whisperings behind 
Mr. Beecher's back, but always so carefully guarded as not, at 
that time, to reach his ears. 

In 1863 Mr. Beecher made his memorable visit to England. 
During his absence he arranged to have Mr. Tilton take the 
entire editorial charge of the Independent. In this the latter did 
so well, that in February, 1864, Mr. Beecher, being then in need 
of relief from the care and responsibility of his position, made 
a new arrangement with Mr. Bowen, whereby Mr. Tilton was to 
be retained as editor-in-chief, Mr. Beecher contributing editori- 
ally and by " Star articles" (his articles were unsigned, but marked 
with * at the foot, hence the name) ; the publication of his ser- 
mons and lecture-room talks being continued, his name remain- 
ing for a year as one of the editors. After one year Tilton was 
to be announced as the actual editor-in-chief. 

In 1865, then, Theodore Tilton found himself at the head of 
one of the most influential papers in the land ; for the Indepen- 
dent, though a religious paper, had, largely through the controver- 
sies on slavery, war, and other important topics carried on by 
Mr. Beecher in its columns, acquired a reputation and influence, 
in general public affairs, that was equalled by no other journal 
of its kind. 

Soon Mr. Tilton's inordinate conceit began to manifest itself. 
He was to supersede, in influence, his patron. From his lofty 
pedestal he could look down upon his old friend and adviser, 
dwarfed by comparison. 

Already he had begun to entertain " advanced " ideas, repu- 
diating as old-fogy and behind the times the principles and 
beliefs which he had received from his former instructor. 
Not content with his fancied overshadowing of Mr. Beecher, he 
began about this time to take part in Bowen's campaign of scan- 
dalous whisperings ; but when one of his tales came to Mr. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



491 



Beecher's ears he promptly denied it and assured Mr. Beecher that 
he had never said anything of the kind, that it was wholly false. 
This denial satisfied Mr. Beecher, who thought no more of the tale. 

When in 1866 Mr. Beecher wrote his "Cleveland letters," 
the Independent assailed him so virulently, through its editorial 
columns, that he felt he could no longer be connected with it, 
even as a contributor, and thereupon terminated his contract and 
all further connection with the paper. This was a further aggra- 
vation in Mr. Bowen's eyes, as it was likely to be a pecuniary 
loss to the paper, and so to him. Shortly after this Mr. Tilton 
began in the editorial columns of the Independent to take a de- 
cidedly " advanced " stand upon religious and ethical subjects. 
His views began to savor very strongly of the atheistic, and he 
more than intimated a belief in theories, on the subject of mar- 
riage, that seemed hardly appropriate in the columns of a religious 
newspaper; so that when he published his "Editorial Soliloquy" 
in 1867, there broke out an indignant protest both from the East 
and West against such a use of the columns of the Independeiit. 
Tilton's course, together with Bowen's retention of certain ob- 
jectionable advertisements, threatened serious injury to the paper. 
Steps were taken to start a new religious paper in Chicago, to su- 
persede the Independent in the West ; at about the same time 
overtures were made to Mr. Beecher, to accept the control of a 
new paper to be started in New York. This alarmed Mr. Bowen, 
who at once promised to muzzle Tilton and prevent the publica- 
tion of any more objectionable " views." On this assurance the 
opposition to the Independent was suspended. The contract was 
a larger one, however, than Bowen had anticipated. Tilton soon 
began anew ventilating his theories, and in December, 1870, wrote 
an editorial so pronounced in its advocacy of his peculiar views, 
that the public patience was exhausted. The Advance was at 
once established in Chicago and became a formidable rival to 
the Independent, Dr. Edward Beecher, the elder brother of Henry 
Ward, being one of its promoters. 

In the fall of 1869 the Christian Union was organized in 
Xew York City, and in January, 1870, Mr. Beecher took control 
of it. Bowen was in despair. Here were two dangerous rivals 
to his paper. He was afraid to discharge Tilton ; he had said 
too much in his presence to care to offend him. He must in 
some way, however, get Tilton out of the editorial chair of the 



492 BIOGRAPHY OF 

Independent. After some negotiation he arranged with Tilton 
that he should resign the editorship of the Independent, and a 
new contract was made by which he should take the editorship 
of the Brooklyn Union for five years, at five thousand dollars a 
year, and should be the chief contributor to the Independent, 
receiving a further five thousand dollars therefor. This change 
was effected on the 20th of December, 1870, and on the 2 2d his 
valedictory was published in the Independent. Up to the year 
1870 Tilton could hardly be said to have been hostile to Mr. 
Beecher, certainly in no such sense as he was during the follow- 
ing year. At this time he looked upon him as his mental and 
social inferior, and not infrequently spoke of him patronizingly, 
as one whom he had outgrown, bestowing upon him a sort of 
affectionate pity because he had been cast in a mould so much 
smaller than his own. It is true that, in that kind of " strictest 
confidence " which always insures a quiet circulation, he whis- 
pered stories, from time to time, derogatory to Mr. Beecher's re- 
putation, but these were born of his vanity, rather than of malice. 
He was still able to see that his own vagaries did not meet with 
public favor. He felt that he was a little ahead of his times, 
and it might benefit him to saddle similar theories upon Mr. 
Beecher. He probably had no intention of doing an injury, at 
least at that time. With Mr. Bowen, however, it was different. 
Mr. Beecher's resignation first from the editorship, and then as 
contributor, and withdrawing his sermons from the Independent, 
was an injury in his eyes for which Tilton's appointment did 
not compensate, and seemed to intensify that ill-will which had 
its origin at the time of the pecuniary misunderstanding, already 
referred to. And now, to have Mr. Beecher's brother partici- 
pate in starting the Advance in Chicago, while he himself accepted 
the management of the Christian Union in New York — a paper 
that sprang at once into a very large circulation, threatening 
to crowd the Independent in the East as the Advance prom- 
ised to do in the West — this capped the climax. Bowen 's dis- 
like was the more -intense since there seemed no way in which 
he could assail Mr. Beecher with any hope of success. His 
whisperings necessarily had to be guarded, and his confidants did 
not seem inclined, or able, to give him much comfort. 

This hostility Mr. Beecher was aware of, though little sus- 
pecting at the time its extent, attributing it to the fact that he 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 493 

had been obliged to withdraw from the Independent, and take a 
stand squarely opposed to its apparent policy. For he wrote 
to a friend : " It is well known that I am in a positive antagon- 
ism with the whole general drift of the paper. Mr. Bowen will 
scarcely recognize me on the street, and feels bitterly my with- 
drawal from all part or lot in the paper." 

By December, 1870, Tilton's attitude had become decidedly 
hostile. His patronizing had now begun to change into fear. 
For he thought that Mr. Beecher might become a dangerous 
rival ; and when finally he was retired from the editorship of 
the Independent he felt sure that it was through some inten- 
tional and malign influence of Mr. Beecher. That his own con- 
duct and expressed opinions were responsible for the change, his 
vanity would not permit him to think. 

As soon as it was publicly known that Tilton had been de- 
posed from the editorial chair of the Independent, the stories of 
his past life began to pour in on Mr. Bowen like a flood. The 
latter was alarmed and began to doubt the possibility of retain- 
ing him in any capacity. 

The expression of this fear to mutual friends led to an inter- 
view between the two. Tilton characteristically mounted his high 
horse, and imperiously demanded an investigation and that he 
be confronted with his accusers. In a very few moments Mr. 
Bowen satisfied him that he was quite fully posted, and that an 
investigation was the last thing that he would desire. 

Tilton then struck out on a new line of operations. Knowing 
Mr. Bowen's fear and dislike of Mr. Beecher, intensified daily by 
the steadily increasing circulation of the Christian Union, Tilton 
cunningly began to suggest the great danger that threatened the 
Independe?it from the Christian Union. 

He struck the keynote to Bowen's animosity, and, skilfully 
working on his feelings, he suggested that their mutual welfare 
demanded the overthrow of Mr. Beecher. Bowen was all atten- 
tion. To destroy Mr. Beecher, and cripple the Christian Union, 
would be a wonderful stroke of good-fortune. 

After referring to the injuries that Bowen had suffered at the 
hands of Mr. Beecher, he suggested that he, too, had a grievance 
against him. This was news to Bowen, who eagerly besought 
Tilton to tell him what it was. He then stated that Beecher 
had been guilty of " improper proposals " to his wife. Bowen was 



494 BIOGRAPHY OF 

quick to discover the situation. This was the first tangible bit of 
evidence which had ever come to him against Mr. Beecher. 
He had never dared publicly father any of his own stories. 

Now, if Tilton would attack Mr. Beecher on such a charge, he 
could stand by and watch the fight without becoming involved 
himself, but would be ready, from his safe point of vantage, to 
take profit by the result, whichever way it ended. If Tilton suc- 
ceeded, so much the better. If he failed, he would be rid of him, 
and would not be responsible for the attack, which Tilton would 
both originate and carry on. 

Mr. Bowen suggested to Tilton the writing of a letter to 
Mr. Beecher, which was written, calling on him to resign his pas- 
torate, and leave Brooklyn. This Bowen was to carry to Mr. 
Beecher, which he did.* 

Mr. Tilton, returning home, reported to his friend Francis D. 
Moulton what he had done, and was informed that he had made 

"a fool" of himself, that he had put himself in Bowen's 

hands. At this point the conspiracy may be said to have been 
born. With the conspiracy proper, from this time out, Mr. 
Bowen seems to have had nothing to do. Both Tilton and Moul- 
ton distrusted him. While his hostility towards Mr. Beecher did 
not abate, and he was soon afterwards clearly recognized as a 
bitter enemy, yet we do not learn that he ever thereafter actively 
co-operated with the two arch-conspirators ; for a short time 
after Tilton's letter he professed to be friendly to Mr. Beecher. 

The carrying of Tilton's letter to Mr. Beecher, and the call- 
ing in of Moulton, were the starting-point of this conspiracy. 

Bowen, as we shall see later, discharged Tilton from both the 
Independent and the Union. 

The latter was in desperate straits, and then it was that he 
and Moulton seemed to have come to the determination to try 
through Mr. Beecher to better Tilton's fortunes. At the first it 
is highly improbable that either had any very definite plan of 
operations against Mr. Beecher, and certainly not the faintest 
idea of the desperate step they would finally be driven to by the 



* We take the details of this interview from Tilton's sworn testimony 
— very poor evidence by itself, but, as it has never been contradicted by 
Mr. Bowen, is consistent with many known facts ; and as the fact of the 
interview was admitted by Mr. Bowen, we have given it place. 

\ 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 495 

logic of their own falsehoods. Little by little, deeper and deeper, 
they worked themselves into the mud and mire, until, as a last 
desperate venture, they were compelled to make the final plunge 
in the hope of forcing through to a solid footing. With this in- 
troduction we give Mr. Beecher's account of this trouble in his 
own words, as written in 1874, when the facts were all fresh in 
his mind ; condensing it somewhat to meet the requirements 
of our space, and omitting details which, though necessary then, 
need not now be gone into. This presents the history as he 
saw it, and shows how Moulton by cunning treachery wormed 
himself into Mr. Beecher's confidence for the purpose of destroy- 
ing him : 

" Four years ago Theodore Tilton fell from one of the proud- 
est editorial chairs in America, where he represented the cause of 
religion, humanity, and patriotism, and in a few months there- 
after became the associate and representative of Victoria Wood- 
hull and the priest of her strange cause. By his follies he was 
bankrupt in reputation, m occupation, and in resources. The in- 
terior history, of which I now give a brief outline, is the history of 
his attempts to so employ me as to reinstate himself in business, 
restore his reputation, and place him again upon the eminence 
from which he had fallen. It is a sad history, to the full mean- 
ing of which I have but recently awaked. Entangled in a wilder- 
ness of complications, I followed until lately a false theory and a 
delusive hope, believing that the friend who assured me of his 
determination and ability to control the vagaries of Mr. Tilton, 
to restore his household, to rebuild his fortunes, and to vindicate 
me, would be equal to that promise. This self-confessed failure 
has made clear to me what for a long time I did not suspect — 
the real motive of Mr. Tilton. My narrative does not represent a 
single standpoint only as regards my opinion of Theodore Tilton. 
It begins at my cordial intimacy with him in his earlier career, 
and shows my lamentation and sorrowful but hopeful affection 
for him during the period of his initial wanderings from truth 
and virtue. It describes my repentance over evils befalling him 
of which I was made to believe myself the cause ; my persevering 
and finally despairing efforts to save him and his family by any 
sacrifice of myself not absolutely dishonorable ; and my growing 
conviction that his perpetual follies and blunders rendered his 
recovery impossible. I can now see that he is and has been 



496 BIOGRAPHY OF 

from the beginning of this difficulty a selfish and reckless 
schemer, pursuing a plan of mingled greed and hatred, and weav- 
ing about me a network of suspicions, misunderstandings, plots, 
and lies, to which my own innocent words and acts, nay, even 
my thoughts of kindness toward him, have been made to con- 
tribute. 

" That I was blind so long to the real nature of the intrigue 
going on around me was due partly to my own overwhelming 
public engagements, partly to my complete surrender of this affair 
and all papers and questions connected with it into the hands of 
Mr. Moulton, who was intensely confident that he could manage 
it successfully. I suffered much, but I inquired little. Mr. Moul- 
ton was chary to me of Mr. Tilton's confidences to him, report- 
ing to me occasionally in a general way Mr. Tilton's moods and 
outbreaks of passion only as elements of trouble which he was 
able to control, and as additional proofs of the wisdom of leaving 
it to him. His comment of the situation seemed to me, at the 
time, complete, immersed as I was in incessant cares and duties, 
and only too glad to be relieved from considering the details of 
such wretched complications, the origin and the fact of which re- 
main, in spite of all friendly intervention, a perpetual burden to 
my soul. I would not read in the papers about it ; I would not 
talk about it. I made Moulton for a long period my confidant 
and my only channel of information. 

" From time to time suspicions were aroused in me by indi- 
cations that Mr. Tilton was acting the part of an enemy ; but 
these suspicions were repeatedly allayed by his own behavior 
towards me in other moods, and by the assurances of Mr. Moul- 
ton, who ascribed the circumstances to misunderstanding or to 
malice on the part of others. It is plain to me now that it was 
not until Mr. Tilton had fallen into disgrace and lost his salary 
that he thought it necessary to assail me with charges which he 
pretended to have had in mind for six months. The domestic 
offence which he alleged was very quickly and easily put aside, 
but yet in such a way as to keep my feelings stirred up, in order 
that I might, through my friends, be used to extract from Mr. 
Bowen $7,000, the amount of a claim in dispute between them. 
The check for that sum in hand, Mr. Tilton signed an agreement 
of peace and concord — not made by me, but accepted by me as 
sincere. The Golden Age had been started. He had the capital 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 



497 



to carry it on for a while. He was sure that he was to lead a 
great social revolution. With returning prosperity he had ap- 
parently no griefs which could not be covered by his signature to 
the articles of peace.* Yet the changes in that covenant, made 
by him before signing it, and represented to me as necessary 
merely to relieve him from the imputation of having originated 
and circulated certain old and shameless slanders about me, were 
really made, as now appears, to leave him free for future opera- 
tions upon me and against me. 

" So long as he was, or thought he was, on the road to a new 
success, his conduct toward me was as friendly as he knew how 
to make it. His assumption of superiority and magnanimity, and 
his patronizing manner, were trifles at which I could afford to 
smile, and which I bore with the greater humility since I still re- 
tained the profound impression made upon me as explained in the 
following narrative — that I had been a cause of overwhelming 
disaster to him, and that his complete restoration to public stand- 
ing and household happiness was a reparation justly required of 
me, and the only one which I could make. 

" But, with a peculiar genius for blunders, he fell almost at 
every step into new complications and difficulties, and in every 
such instance it was his policy to bring coercion to bear upon my 
honor, my conscience, and my affections, for the purpose of pro- 
curing his extrication at my expense. Theodore Tilton knew me 
well. He has said again and again to his friends that if they 
wished to gain influence over me they must work upon the sym- 
pathetic side of my nature. To this he has addressed himself 
steadily for four years, using as a lever, without scruple, my at- 
tachment to my friends, to my family, to his own household, and 
even my old affection for himself. 

" Not blind to his faults, but resolved to look on him as fa- 
vorably and hopefully as possible, and ignorant of his deeper 
malice, I labored earnestly, even desperately, for his salvation. 
For four years I have been trying to feed his insatiable egotism, 
to make the man as great as he conceived himself to be, to re- 
store to popularity and public confidence one who, in the midst 
of my efforts in his behalf, patronized disreputable people and 
doctrines, refused when I besought him to separate himself from 

* Tripartite agreement. 



498 BIOGRAPHY OF 

them, and ascribed to my agency the increasing ruin which he was 
persistently bringing upon himself, and which I was doing my ut- 
most to avert. It was hard to do anything for such a man. I 
might as well have tried to fill a sieve with water. In the latter 
part of the history he actually incited and created difficulties, ap- 
parently for no other purpose than to drive me to fresh exertions. 
I refused to endorse his wild views and associates. The best I 
could do was to speak well of him, mention those good qualities 
and abilities which I believed him to possess in his higher moods, 
and keeping silent concerning the evil things which, I was as- 
sured and believed, had been greatly exaggerated by public re- 
port. I could not think him so bad as my friends did. I trusted 
to the germs of good which I thought still lived in him, to Mr. 
Moulton's apparent power over him, and to the power of my 
persistent self-sacrifice. 

" Mr. Moulton came to me at first as the schoolmate and 
friend of Mr. Tilton, determined to reinstate him, I at first sus- 
pected, without regard to my interests, but on further acquaint- 
ance with me he undertook and promised to serve his friend 
without doing wrong to me. He said he saw clearly how this 
was to be done, so as to restore peace and harmony to Mr. 
Tilton's home, and bring a happy end to all misunderstandings. 
Many things which he counselled I absolutely refused, but I 
never doubted his professed friendship for me, after friendship 
had grown up between us ; and whatever he wished me to do 
I did, unless it seemed to me wrong. 

" My confidence in him was the only element that seemed 
secure in that confusion of tormenting perplexities. To him I 
wrote freely in that troublous time, when I felt that secret ma- 
chinations were going on around me, and echoes of the vilest 
slander concerning me were heard of in unexpected quarters ; 
when some of my near relatives were set against me, and the 
tattle of a crowd of malicious women, hostile to me on other 
grounds, was borne to my ears ; when I had lost the last remnant 
of faith in Mr. Tilton or hope for him ; when I heard with un- 
speakable remorse that everything I had done to stay his destruc- 
tion had made matters worse and worse ; that my attempt to 
keep him from a public trial (involving such a flood of scandal 
as has now been let loose) had been used by him to bring up new 
troubles ; that his unhappy wife was, under his dictation, signing 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER 



499 



papers and recantations, and I knew not what ; that, in short, 
everything was breaking up, and the destruction from which I 
had sought to save the family was likely to be emptied on other 
families, the church, the community, with infinite horrors of woe 
for me ; that my own innocence was buried under heaps and 
heaps of rubbish, and nobody but my professed friend (if even 
he) could save us. To his assurances that he could still do so I 
gave at least so much faith as to maintain under these terrible 
trials the silence which he enjoined. Not until Mr. Tilton, hav- 
ing attempted, through Frank Carpenter, to raise money from 
my friends, openly assailed me in his letter to Dr. Bacon, did I 
break that silence, save my simple denial of the slanderous 
rumors against me a year before. 

" On the appearance of the first open attack from Mr. Tilton 
I immediately, without consulting Mr. Moulton, called for a 
thorough investigation with a committee of my church. I am 
not responsible for the delay, the publicity, or the details of that 
investigation. All the harm which I have so long dreaded and 
have so earnestly striven to avoid has come to pass. I could not 
have further prevented it without a full surrender of honor and 
truth. The time has arrived when I can freely speak in vindica- 
tion of myself. I labor under great disadvantages in making a 
statement. My memory of states of the mind is clear and tena- 
cious, better than my memory of dates and details. During four 
troubled years, in all of which I have been singularly burdened 
with public labor, having established and conducted the Chris- 
tian Union, delivered courses of lectures, preaching before the 
Theological Seminary of Yale College, written the first volume 
of the ' Life of Christ,' delivered each winter Lyceum lectures in 
all the North and West — all these duties, with the care of the 
great church and its outlying schools and chapels, and the mis- 
cellaneous business which falls upon a clergyman more than 
upon any other public man, I have kept in regard, and now, with 
the necessity of explaining actions and letters resulting from com- 
plex influences apparent at the time, I find myself in a position 
where I know my innocence without being able to prove it with 
detailed explanation. I am one upon whom trouble works in- 
wardly, making me outwardly silent but reverberating in the 
chambers of my soul ; and when at length I do speak it is a pent- 
up flood and pours without measure or moderation. I inherit a 



500 BIOGRAPHY OF 

tendency to sadness, the remains in me of positive hypochondria 
in my father and grandfather, and in certain moods of reaction 
the world becomes black and I see very despairingly. 

" If I were, in such moods, to speak as I feel, I should give 
false colors and exaggerated proportions of everything. This 
manifestation is in such contrast to the hopefulness and courage 
which I experience in ordinary times that none but those intimate 
with me would suspect one so full of overflowing spirit and eager 
gladsomeness to have within him a cave of gloom and despon- 
dency. Some of my letters to Mr. Moulton reflect this morbid 
feeling. He understood it, and at times reproved me for indulg- 
ing in it. With this preliminary review I proceed to my narra- 
tive. 

" Mr. Tilton was first known to me as a reporter of my ser- 
mons. He was then a youth just from school and working on the 
New York Observer. From this paper he passed to the Indepen- 
dent, and became a great favorite with Mr. Bowen. When, about 
1861, Drs. Bacon, Storrs, and Thompson resigned their places, I 
became editor of the Independent, to which I had been from its 
start a contributor. One of the inducements held out to me was 
that Mr. Tilton should be my assistant and relieve me wholly 
from routine office work. In this relation I became very much 
attached to him. We used to stroll the galleries and print-shops 
and dine often together. His mind was opening freshly and with 
enthusiasm upon all questions. I used to pour out my ideas of 
civil affairs, public policy, religion, and philanthropy. Of this 
he often spoke with grateful appreciation, and mourned at a later 
day over its cessation. 

" August was my vacation month, but my family repaired to 
my farm in June and July, and remained there during Septem- 
ber and October. My labors confining me to the city, I took my 
meals in the families of friends, and from year to year I became 
so familiar with their children and homes that I went in and out 
daily almost as in my own house. Mr. Tilton often alluded to 
this habit, and urged me to do the same by his house. He used 
to often speak in extravagant terms of his wife's esteem and af- 
fection for me. After I began to visit his house he sought to 
make it attractive. He urged me to bring my papers down there 
and use his study to do my writing in, as it was not pleasant to 
write in the office of the Independeiit. When I went to England 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 50 1 

in 1863 Mr. Tilton took temporary charge of the Independent. 
On my return I paved the way for him to take sole charge of it, 
my name remaining for a year, and then he becoming the respon- 
sible editor. Friendly relations continued until 1866, when the 
violent assaults made upon me by Mr. Tilton in the Independent, 
on account of my Cleveland letter, and the temporary discontinu- 
ation of the publication of my sermons in that paper, broke off 
my connection* with it. Although Mr. Tilton and I remained 
personally on good terms, yet there was a coolness between us in 
all matters of politics. During this whole period I never received 
from Mr. Tilton or any member of his family the slightest hint 
that there was any dissatisfaction with my familiar relations to 
his household. As late, I think, as the winter of 1869, when 
going upon an extended lecturing tour, he said ; ' I wish you 
would look in after, and see that Libby is not lonesome or does 
not want anything,' or words to that effect. Never by sign or 
word did Mr. Tilton complain of my visits to his family until he 
began to fear that the Independent would be taken from him, nor 
did he break out into violence until on the eve of dispossession 
from both the papers — the Independent and the Brooklyn Union 
— owned by Mr. Bowen. 

" In the latter part of July, 1870, Mrs. Tilton was sick, and at 
her request I visited her. She seemed much depressed, but gave 
me no hint of any trouble having reference to me. I cheered 
her as best I could, and prayed with her just before leaving. 
This was our last interview before trouble broke out in the 
family. I describe it because it was the last, and its character 
has a bearing upon a later part of my story. Concerning all my 
visits it is sufficient to say that at no interview which ever took 
place between Mrs. Tilton and myself did anything occur which might 
not have occurred with perfect propriety between a brother and sis- 
ter, between a father and child, or between a man of honor and the 
wife of his dearest friend ; nor did anything ever happen which 
she or I sought to conceal from her husband. 

" Some years before any open trouble between Mr. Tilton and 
myself, his doctrines, as set forth in the leaders of the Indepen- 
dent, aroused a storm of indignation among the representative 
Congregationalists in the West ; and as the paper was still very 
largely supposed to be my organ, I was written to on the subject. 
In reply I indignantly disclaimed all responsibility for the views 



5<D2 BIOGRAPHY OF 

expressed by Mr. Tilton. It was understood that Mr. Bowen 
agreed, in consequence of proceedings arising out of this remon- 
strance, to remove Mr. Tilton or suppress his peculiar views, but 
instead of that he seemed firmer in the saddle than before, and 
his loose notions of marriage and divorce began to be shadowed 
editorially. This led to the starting of the Advance in Chicago, 
to supersede the Independent in the Northwest, and Mr. Bowen 
was made to feel that Mr. Tilton's management was seriously in- 
juring the business, and Mr. Tilton may have felt that his posi- 
tion was being undermined by opponents of his views with whom 
he subsequently pretended to believe I was in league. Vague 
intimations of his ' feeling hard ' toward me I ascribed to this 
misconception. I had in reality taken no step to harm him. 

"After Mr. Tilton's return from the West in December, 1870, 
a young girl whom Mrs. Tilton had taken into the family, educat- 
ed, and treated like an own child was sent to me with an urgent 
request that I would visit Mrs. Tilton at her mother's. She said 
that Mrs. Tilton had left her home and gone to her mother's in 
consequence of ill-treatment of her husband. She then gave an 
account of what she had seen of cruelty and abuse on the part of 
the husband that shocked me ; I immediately visited Mrs. Tilton 
at her mother's, and received an account of her home life, and 
of the despotism of her husband, and of the management of a 
woman whom he had made housekeeper, which seemed like a 
nightmare dream. The question was whether she should go 
back or separate for ever from her husband. I asked permission 
to bring my wife to see them, whose judgment in all domestic 
relations I thought better than my own ; and accordingly a sec- 
ond visit was made. The result of the interview was that my 
wife was extremely indignant toward Mr. Tilton, and declared 
that no consideration on earth would induce her to remain an 
hour with a man who had treated her with a hundredth part of 
such insult and cruelty. I felt as strongly as she did, but hesi- 
tated, as I always do, at giving advice in favor of a separation. 
It was agreed that my wife should give her final advice at 
another visit. The next day, when ready to go, she wished a 
final word ; but there was company, and the children were pres- 
ent, and so I wrote on a scrap of paper, ' I incline to think that 
your view is right, and that a separation and a settlement of sup- 
port will be wisest, and that in his present desperate state her 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 503 

presence near him is far more likely to produce hatred than her 
absence.' 

" Mrs. Tilton did not tell me that my presence had anything 
to do with this trouble, nor did she let me know that on the 
July previous he had extorted from her a confession of excessive 
affection for me. 

"On the evening of December 27, 1870, Mr. Bowen, on his 
way home, called at my house and handed me a letter from Mr. 
Tilton. It was, as nearly as I can remember, in the following 
terms : 



u . 



Henry Ward Beecher : For reasons which you explicit- 
ly know, and which I forbear to state, I demand that you with- 
draw from the pulpit and quit Brooklyn as a residence. 



a i 



Theodore Tilton.' 



" I read it over twice, and turned to Bowen and said : ' This 
man is crazy ; this is sheer insanity,' and other like words. Mr. 
Bowen professed to be ignorant of the contents, and I handed 
him the letter to read. We at once fell into a conversation 
about Mr. Tilton. He gave me some account of the reasons 
why he had reduced him from the editorship of the Independent 
to the subordinate position of contributor — namely, that Mr. Til- 
ton's religious and social views were ruining the paper. But he 
said as soon as it was known that he had so far broken with Mr. 
Tilton, there came pouring in upon him so many stories of Mr. 
Tilton's private life and habits that he was overwhelmed, and 
that he was now considering whether he could consistently retain 
him on the Brooklyn Union or as chief contributor to the Inde- 
pendent. We conversed for some time, Mr. Bowen wishing my 
opinion. It was frankly given. I did not see how he could 
maintain his relations with Mr. Tilton- The substance of the 
conversation was that Tilton's inordinate vanity, his fatal facility 
for blundering (for which he had a genius), and ostentatious in- 
dependence in his own opinions, and general impracticableness, 
would keep the Union at disagreement with the political party 
for whose service it was published ; and now, added to all this, 
these revelations of these promiscuous immoralities would make 
his connection with either paper fatal to its interests. I spoke 
strongly and emphatically under the great provocation of his 



504 BIOGRAPHY OF 

threatening letter to me and the revelation I had just had con- 
cerning his domestic affairs. 

" Mr. Bowen derided this letter of Tilton's which he had 
brought to me, and said earnestly that if trouble came out of it I 
might rely upon his friendship. I learned afterwards that in the 
further quarrel, ending in Tilton's peremptory expulsion from 
Bowen's service, this conversation was repeated to Mr. Tilton. 
Although I have no doubt that Mr. Tilton would have lost his 
place at any rate, I have also no doubt that my influence was de- 
cisive and precipitated his final overthrow. When I came to think 
it all over, I felt very unhappy at the contemplation of Mr. Til- 
ton's impending disaster. I had loved him much, and at one time 
he had seemed like a son to me. 

" But now all looked dark ; he was to be cast forth from his 
eminent position, and his affairs at home did not promise that 
sympathy and strength which make one's house, as mine has been, 
in times of adversity, a refuge from the storm and a tower of de- 
fence. 

"It now appears that on the 29th of December, 1870, Mr. 
Tilton, having learned that I had replied to his threatening letter, 
by expressing such an opinion of him as to set Mr. Bowen finally 
against him, and bring him face to face with immediate ruin, ex- 
torted from his wife, then suffering under a severe illness, a docu- 
ment incriminating me, and prepared an elaborate attack upon 
me. 

" In my then morbid condition of mind I thought that this 
charge, although entirely untrue, might result in great disaster, if 
not absolute ruin. The great interests which were entirely de- 
pendent on me, the church which I had built up, the book which 
I was writing, my own immediate family, my brother's name, now 
engaged in the ministry, my sisters, the name which I had hoped 
might live after me and be in some slight degree a source of 
strength and encouragement to those who should succeed me, 
and, above all, the cause for which I had devoted my life, seemed 
imperilled. It seemed to me that my life-work was to end ab- 
ruptly and in disaster. My earnest desire to avoid a public ac- 
cusation, and the evils which must necessarily flow from it, and 
which now have resulted from it, has been one of the leading 
motives that must explain my action during these four years with 
reference to this matter. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 505 

"It was in such a sore and distressing condition that Mr. 
Moulton found me. His manner was kind and conciliatory ; he 
seemed, however, to be convinced that I had been seeking Til- 
ton's downfall, that I had leagued with Mr. Bowen against him, 
and that I had by my advice come near destroying his family. I 
did not need any argument or persuasion to induce me to do, and 
say, anything which would remedy the injury, of which I then be- 
lieved, I had certainly been the occasion if not the active cause. 
But Mr. Moulton urged that, having wronged so, the wrong meant 
his means of support taken away, his reputation gone, his family 
destroyed, and that I had done it. He assured me of his own 
knowledge that the stories which I had heard against Mr. Tilton, 
and which I had believed and repeated to Mr. Bowen, were all 
false. I was persuaded into the belief of what he had said, and 
felt convicted of slander in its meanest form. He drew the pic- 
ture of Mr. Tilton wronged in reputation, in position, wronged in 
purse, shattered in his family where he would otherwise have found 
a refuge, and at the same time looking upon me out of his deep 
distress, while I was abounding in friends, most popular, and with 
ample means; he drew that picture — my prosperity overflowing and 
abounding, and Tilton's utter degradation. I was most intensely 
excited. Indeed, I felt that my mind was in danger of giving 
way. I walked up and down the room, pouring forth my heart in 
the most unrestrained grief and bitterness of self -accusation, tell- 
ing what my ideas were of the obligation of friendship and of 
the sacredness of the household ; denying, however, an inten- 
tional wrong, saying that if I had been the cause, however re- 
motely, of that which I then beheld, I never could forgive my- 
self, and heaping all the blame on my own head. The case, as it 
then appeared to my eyes, was strongly against me. My old fel- 
low-worker had been dispossessed of his eminent place and in- 
fluence, and I had counselled it. His family had well-nigh been 
broken up, and I had advised it ; his wife had been long sick and 
broken in health and body, and I, as I fully believed it, had been 
the cause of all this wreck by continuing that blind heedlessness 
and friendship which had beguiled her heart and had roused her 
husband into a fury of jealousy, although not caused by any in- 
tentional act of mine. And should I coldly defend myself? 
Should I pour indignation upon this lady ? Should I hold her up 
to contempt as having thrust her affections upon me unsought ? 



506 BIOGRAPHY OF 

Should I tread upon the man and his household in their great 
adversity ? I gave vent to my feelings without measure. I dis- 
claimed with the greatest earnestness all intent to harm Theodore 
in his home or his business, and with inexplicable sorrow I both 
blamed and defended Mrs. Tilton in one breath. 

" I had not then the light that I now have. There was much 
then that weighed heavily upon my heart and conscience which 
now weighs only on my heart. I had not the light which ana- 
lyzes and discriminates things. By one blow there opened before 
me a revelation full of anguish : an agonized family, whose in- 
mates had been my friends, greatly beloved ; the husband ruined 
in worldly prospects, the household crumbling to pieces, the 
woman, by long sickness and suffering, either corrupted to de- 
ceit, as her husband alleged, or so broken in mind as to be 
irresponsible ; and either way it was her enthusiasm for her pas- 
tor, as I was made to believe, that was the germ and beginning 
of the trouble. It was for me to have forestalled and prevented 
that mischief. My age and experience in the world should have 
put me more on my guard. I could not at that time tell what 
was true, and what was not true, of all the considerations urged 
upon me by Mr. Tilton and Moulton. There was a gulf be- 
fore me in which lay those who had been warm friends, and 
they alleged that I had helped to plunge them therein. That 
seemed enough to fill my soul with sorrow and anguish. No 
mother who has lost a child but will understand the wild self- 
accusation that grief produced, against all reason, blaming her- 
self for what things she 'did do, and for what she neglected to 
do, and charging upon herself, her neglect or heedlessness, the 
death of her child, while ordinarily every one knows that she 
had worn herself out with her assiduities. 

" Mr. Moulton and Mr. Tilton both strove to obliterate from 
my mind all belief in the rumors that had been circulated about 
Mr. Tilton. There was much going on in silencing, explaining, 
arranging, etc., that I did not understand as well then as now. 
But of one thing I was then convinced, viz., that Mr. Tilton had 
never strayed from the path of virtue. I was glad to believe it 
true, and felt how hard it was that he should be made to suffer 
by evil and slanderous foes. I could not explain some testimony 
which had been laid before me ; but, I said, there is undoubtedly 
some misunderstanding, and if I knew the whole I should find 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 507 

Theodore, though with obvious faults, at heart sound and good. 
These views I often expressed to intimate friends in spite of their 
manifest incredulity, and what, in the light of the facts, I must 
now call their well-deserved ridicule. Mr. Moulton lost no oc- 
casion of presenting to me the kindest view of Mr. Tilton's 
character and conduct. On the other hand, he complained that 
Mrs. Tilton did not trust her husband or him, and did not assist 
him in his effort to help Theodore. I knew that she distrusted 
Mr. Moulton, and felt bitterly hurt by the treatment of her hus- 
band. I was urged to use my influence with her to inspire confi- 
dence in Moulton and to lead her to take a kinder view of 
Theodore. Accordingly, at the instance of Mr. Moulton, on 
February 7, 1871, I wrote a letter to her of that date, designed 
for the purpose of giving her confidence in Mr. Moulton. 

" In my letter to Mrs. Tilton I alluded to the fact that I did 
not expect, when I saw her last, to be alive many days. That 
statement stands connected with a series of symptoms which I 
first experienced in 1856. I went through the Fremont cam- 
paign, speaking in the open air three hours at a time, three days 
in the week. On renewing my literary labors I felt I must have 
given way; I very seriously thought that I was going to have apo- 
plexy or paralysis, or something of the kind. On two or three 
occasions, while preaching, I shoufd have fallen in the pulpit if 
I had not held on to the table. Very often I came near falling 
in the streets. During the last fifteen years I have gone into the 
pulpit, I suppose a hundred times, with a very strong impression 
that I should never come out of it alive. I have preached more 
sermons than any human being would believe, when I felt all the 
while, that whatever I had got to say to my people I must say 
then, or I never would have another chance to say it. If I had 
consulted a physician, his first advice would have been, ' You 
must stop work.' But I was in such a situation that I could not 
stop work. I read the best medical books on symptoms of ner- 
vous prostration, and overwork, and paralysis, and formed my 
own judgment of my case. The three points I marked were : I 
must have good digestion, good sleep, and I must go on work- 
ing. These three things were to be reconciled; and in regard to 
my diet, stimulants, and medicines I made the most thorough 
and searching trial, and, as the result, managed my body so 
that I could get the most work out of it without essentially 



go8 BIOGRAPHY OF 

impairing it. If I had said a word about this to my family, it 
would have brought such distress and anxiety on the part of my 
wife, as I could not have borne. I have for many years so stead- 
ily taxed my mind to the utmost that there have been periods 
when I could not afford to have people express even sympathy 
with me. To have my wife or friends anxious about my health, 
and showing it to me, would be just the drop too much. 

"In 1863 I came again into the same condition just before 
going to England, and that was one of the reasons why I wished 
to go. The war was at its height. I carried my country in 
my heart. I had the Independent in charge, and was working, 
preaching, and lecturing continually. I knew I was likely to be 
prostrated again. 

" In December, 1870, the sudden shock of these troubles 
brought on again these symptoms in a more violent form. I was 
very much depressed in mind, and all the more, because it was 
one of those things that I could not say anything about ; I was 
silent with everybody. During the last four years these symp- 
toms had been repeatedly brought on by my intense work, car- 
ried forward on the underlying basis of so much sorrow and 
trouble. 

" My friends will bear witness, that in the pulpit, I have very 
frequently alluded to my expectation of sudden death. I feel 
that I have more than once, already, been near a stroke that 
would have killed or paralyzed me, and I carry with me now, 
as I have so often carried, in years before this trouble began, the 
daily thought of death, as a door which might open for me, at 
any moment, out of all cares and labors into most welcome rest.* 

* These impressions of impending death he carried with him con- 
stantly during the year or two just preceding the final outbreak of this 
plot. 

In the spring of 1873 he wrote to his wife : 

"My dear Wife: Thanks for your letter from Jacksonville. It 
cheered me. God knows that I do not need any more loads; and a com- 
forting letter never could come to a better market. 

"My life is almost over. I am like one waiting for the stage, his 
things all packed. The world is bright enough and good enough, and I 
enjoy a hundred things in it, and am neither moody nor morbid. Yet I 
have an abiding sense that my work is almost done. Every new thing 
done, lecture, sermon, or course of lectures, I count as clear gain — so 
much more than I expected. What the other life is I do not know, and 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



509 



"During the whole of the year 1871 I was kept in a state of 
suspense and doubt, not only as to the future of the family, for 
the reunion and happiness of which I had striven so earnestly, 
but as to the degree to which I might be personally subject to 
attack and misconstruction, and the trouble be brought into the 
church and magnified by publicity. The officers of the church 
sought to investigate Mr. Tilton's religious views and moral con- 
duct. On the latter point I had been deceived into the belief 
that he was not in fault. As to the religious views, I still hoped 
for a change for the better. It was proposed to drop him from 
the list of members for non-attendance; and as he asserted to me 
his withdrawal, this might have been done, but his wife still at- 
tended the church and hoped for his restoration. I recollect 
having with him a conversation in which he dimly hinted to me 
that he thought it not unlikely that he might go back into his old 
position. lie seemed to be in a mood to regret the past. And 
so, when I was urged by the Examining Committee to take some 
steps, I said I was not without hopes that by patience and kind- 



none know so little as those who pretend to know best. That it will be 
bright and gladdening I am sure; that is all. That I have had success 
and achieved something gives me pleasure, chiefly because my life has 
been used for those who were weak and helpless. My lot has been cast 
in a time when the rights of the under-classes were to be considered. 
That I have been identified with that great movement of humanity is re- 
ward enough, and is the chief satisfaction which I take in the retrospect. 
But enough, enough." 

In another letter : 

" I wish I were with you. When you are gone I feel how much you 
are to me. May God keep you for me for many years to come, if many 
years are in store for me. 

" Your loving but heavy-hearted husband, 

" H. W. B." 

In his private diary he wrote: 

" I have not lived for myself; all my force has been devoted to the 
promotion of men's happiness — happiness through justice, truth, good- 
ness. Whatever prosperity I have had came to me almost unconsciously, 
certainly not by any wit or wisdom of my own. I am grateful for having 
lived. I shall go without murmur or discontent. 

" I hope that there will be those who will be sorry when I leave, and 
those beyond who will be glad when I arrive." 

This same feeling remained with him, more or less, though not in so 
pronounced a form, through the remainder of his life. 



5 IO BIOGRAPHY Of 

ness Tilton might come back again into his old church works and 
be one of us once more. I therefore delayed a decision upon this 
point for a long time. Many of our members were anxious and 
impatient, and there were many tokens of trouble from this quar- 
ter. Meanwhile one wing of the female-suffrage party, had got 
hold of his story in a distorted and exaggerated form, such as 
had never been intimated to me by Mr. Tilton or his friends. 
I did not then suspect what I now know, that these atrociously 
false rumors originated with Mr. Tilton himself. I only saw the 
evil growing instead of diminishing, and perceived that while I 
was pledged to silence, and therefore could not speak in my own 
defence, some one was for ever persevering in falsehood, grow- 
ing continually in dimensions, and these difficulties were im- 
mensely increased by the affiliation of Mr. Tilton with the 
extremists in the female-suffrage party. 

"The winter following (1871-72) Mr. Tilton returned from 
the lecture-field in despair. Engagements had been cancelled, 
invitations withdrawn, and he spoke of the prejudice and repug- 
nance with which he was everywhere met as indescribable. I 
urged him to make a prompt repudiation of these women and 
their doctrines. I told him that no man could rise against the 
public sentiment with such a load. Mr. Tilton 's vanity seldom 
allowed him to regard himself as in the wrong or his actions 
faulty. He could never be made to believe that his failure to 
rise again was caused by his partnership with these women, and 
by his want of sensible work, which work should make the pub- 
lic feel that he had in him power for good. Instead of this he 
preferred, or professed, to think that I was using my influence 
against him, that I was allowing him to be traduced without 
coming generously to the front to defend him, and that my 
friends were working against him; to which I replied that, unless 
the laws of mind were changed, not Almighty God Himself could 
lift him into favor if these women must be lifted with him. Never- 
theless I sought in every way to restore peace and concord to the 
family which I was made to feel had been injured by me and 
was dependent on my influence for recovery. 

" But one thing was constant and apparent — when Tilton, by 
lecturing or otherwise, was prosperous, he was very genial and 
affectionate to me. Whenever he met rebuffs and was in pecuni- 
ary trouble, he scowled threateningly upon me as the author of 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 51 I 

his troubles, and Moulton himself seemed at times to accuse me 
of indifference to Tilton's misfortunes. 

" I now come in my narrative to give an account of the origin 
of the somewhat famous tripartite agreement. Early in Febru- 
ary, 1872, Mr. Tilton returned to the city thoroughly discour- 
aged with the result of his lecturing tour. The Golden Age (a 
paper organized for Tilion by his friends), which had then been 
established for about twelve months, had not succeeded, and was 
understood to be losing money. His pecuniary obligations were 
pressing, and although his claim against Bowen for the violation 
of his two contracts had a year previously been put under the 
exclusive control of Moulton with a view of settlement, it had 
not as yet been effected. About this time Mr. Moulton, who was 
sick, sent for me and showed me a galley-proof of an article, pre- 
pared by Mr. Tilton for the Golden Age, in which he embodied 
a copy of a letter written by him to Mr. Bowen, dated January 1, 
187 1, in which he charged Mr. Bowen with making scandalous 
accusations against my character. This was the first time that I 
had ever seen these charges, and I had never heard of them ex- 
cept by mere rumor, Mr. Bowen never having, at any time, said 
a word to me on the subject. I was amazed at the proposed 
publication. I did not then understand the real object of giving 
circulation to such slanders. My first impression was that Mr. 
Tilton designed, under cover of an attack upon me in the name 
of another, to open the way for the publication of his own pre- 
tended personal grievances. I protested against the publication 
in the strongest terms, but was informed that it was not intended 
as an hostile act to myself, but to Mr. Bowen. I did not any 
the less insist upon my protest against this publication. On its 
being shown to Mr. Bowen he was thoroughly alarmed, and 
speedily consented to the appointment of arbitrators to bring 
about an amicable settlement. The result of this proceeding 
was that Mr. Bowen paid Mr. Tilton over $7,000, and that a 
written agreement was entered into by Bowen, Tilton, and my- 
self of amnesty, concord, and future peace.* It was agreed that 
the offensive article, the publication of which had produced such 

* "We three men, earnestly desiring to remove all causes of offence 
existing between us, real or fancied, and to make Christian reparation for 
injuries done, or supposed to have been done, and to efface the disturbed 



5 I 2 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

an effect upon Mr. Bowen and secured a settlement, should be 
destroyed without seeing the light. It was an act of treachery 
peculiarly base that this article was permitted to get into hands 
which would insure its publication, and that it was published. I 

past, and to provide concord, good-will, and love for the future, do declare 
and covenant each to the others as follows : 

"I. I, Henry C. Bowen, having given credit, perhaps without due 
consideration, to tales and innuendoes affecting Henry Ward Beecher, and 
being influenced by them, as was natural to a man who receives impres- 
sions suddenly, to the extent of repeating them (guardedly, however, and 
within limitations, and not for the purpose of injuring him, but strictly in 
the confidence of consultation), now feel therein that I did him wrong. 

" Therefore I disavow all the charges and imputations that have been 
attributed to me, as having been by me made against Henry Ward Beecher, 
and I declare fully and without reserve that I know nothing which should 
prevent me from extending to him my most cordial friendship, confidence, 
and Christian fellowship; and I expressly withdraw all the charges, impu- 
tations, and innuendoes imputed as having been made and uttered by me, 
and set forth in a letter written to me by Theodore Tilton on the ist day of 
January, 1871; and I sincerely regret having made any imputations, charges, 
or innuendoes unfavorable to the Christian character of Mr. Beecher, and I 
covenant and promise that for all future time I will never by word or deed 
recur to, repeat, or allude to any or either of said charges, imputations, and 
innuendoes. 

" II. And I, Theodore Tilton, do, of my own free will and friendly 
spirit toward Henry C. Bowen and Henry Ward Beecher, hereby covenant 
and agree that I will never again repeat, by word of mouth or otherwise, 
any of the allegations, or imputations, or innuendoes contained in my letter 
hereunto annexed, or any other injurious imputations or allegations sug- 
gested by or growing out of these; and that I will never again bring up or 
hint at any cause of difference or ground of complaint heretofore existing 
between the said Henry C. Bowen and myself or the said Henry Ward 
Beecher. 

"III. And I, Henry Ward Beecher, put the past for ever out of 
sight and out of memory. I deeply regret the causes of suspicion, jealous)', 
and estrangement which have come between us. It is a joy to me to have 
my old regard for Henry C. Bowen and Theodore Tilton restored, and a 
happiness to me to resume the old relations of love, respect, and reliance 
to each and both of them. If I have said anything injurious to the reputa- 
tion of either, or have detracted from their standing and fame as Christian 
gentlemen and members of my church, I revoke it all, and heartily cove- 
nant to repair and reinstate them to the extent of my power. 

"Henry Ward Beecher. 
"Theodore Tilton. 
" Henry C. Bowen." 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 513 

was assured that every vestige of it had been destroyed, nor until 
a comparatively recent period did I understand how Mr. Tilton 
secured its publication without seeming to be himself responsible 
for the deed. 

" After vainly attempting to obtain money both from myself 
and my wife as the price of its suppression, the Woodhull women 
published their version of the Tilton scandal in the November of 
1872. The details given by them were so minute, though so dis- 
torted, that suspicion was universally directed toward Mr. Tilton 
as the real author of this, which he so justly calls ' a wicked and 
horrible scandal,' though it is not a whit more horrible than that 
which he has now fathered, and not half so wicked, because they 
did not have personal knowledge of the falsity of their story, as 
Mr. Tilton has of his. 

" To rid himself of this incubus Mr. Tilton drew up a volu- 
minous paper called ' A true statement,' but which was familiarly 
called ' Tilton's case.' Tilton's furor for compiling statements 
was one of my familiar annoyances. Moulton used to tell me 
that the only way to manage him was to let him work off his pe- 
riodical passion on some such document, and then to pounce on 
the document and suppress it. This particular ' true statement ' 
was a special plea in abatement of the prejudices excited by his 
Woodhull partnership. It was a muddle of garbled statements, 
manufactured documents, and downright falsehoods. This paper 
I knew he read to many, and I am told that he read it to not less 
than fifty persons, in which he did not pretend to charge immoral- 
ity upon his wife ; on the contrary, he explicitly denied it and as- 
serted her purity, but charged me with improper overtures to her. 
It was this paper which he read to Dr. Storrs, and poisoned there- 
with his mind, thus leading to the attempt to prosecute Tilton in 
Plymouth Church, the interference of neighboring churches, and 
the calling of the Congregational Council. After the Woodhull 
story was published, and while Mr. Tilton seemed really desirous 
for a short time of protecting his wife, I sent through him the 
following letter to her : 



U I 



My dear Mrs. Tilton : I hoped that you would be shield- 
ed from the knowledge of the great wrong that has been done to 
you, and through you to universal womanhood. I can hardly 
bear to speak of it or allude to a matter than which nothing can 



5 1 4 BIOGRAPHY OF 

be imagined more painful to a pure and womanly nature. 1 
pray daily for you " that your faith fail not." You yourself know 
the way and the power of prayer. God has been your refuge in 
many sorrows before. He will now hide you in His pavilion until 
the storm be overpast. The rain that beats down the flower to 
the earth shall pass at length, and the stem bent but not broken 
will rise again and blossom as before. Every pure woman on 
earth will feel that this wanton and unprovoked assault is aimed 
at you, but reaches to universal womanhood. Meantime your 
dear children will love you with double tenderness, and Theo- 
dore, at whom the shafts are hurled, will hide you in his heart of 
hearts. I am glad that revelation from the pit has given him 
a sight of the danger that was before hidden by spurious ap- 
pearances and promises of usefulness. May God keep him in 
courage in this arduous struggle which he wages against adversi- 
ty, and bring him out through much trial, like gold seven times 
fined ! I have not spoken of myself. No words could express 
the sharpness and depth of my sorrow in your behalf, my dear 
and honored friend. God walks in the fire by the side of those 
He loves, and in heaven neither you nor Theodore nor I shall 
regret the discipline, how hard soever it may seem now. May He 
restrain and turn those poor creatures who have been given over 
to do all this sorrowful harm to those who have deserved no such 
treatment at their hands ! I commend you to my mother's God, 
my dear friend ! May His smile bring light in darkness, and His 
love be a perpetual summer to you ! 

" Very truly yours, 

" Henry Ward Beecher." 

" The whole series of events, beginning with the outbreak of 
the Woodhull story, brought upon me a terrible accumulation 
of anxieties. Everything that had threatened before now start- 
ed up again with new violence. Tilton's behavior was at once 
inexplicable and uncontrollable. His card - to a complaining 
friend ' did not produce the effect he pretended to expect from 
it, of convincing the public of his great magnanimity. Then 
his infamous article and letter to Mr. Bowen made its appear- 
ance in the Eagle, It had been suggested that the publica- 
tion of the ' tripartite covenant ' would have a good effect in coun- 
teracting the slanderous stories about Mrs. Tilton and myself, 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 515 

which Tilton professed to regard, but which his foolish card and 
the publication of that article had done so much to revive and 
render mischievous. Mr. Moulton urged me to get from the gen- 
tleman who held the ' tripartite covenant ' a copy of it for us, 
when suddenly Mr. Wilkeson came out with it on his own respon- 
sibility. Its publication in this manner I made strenuous but 
unavailing efforts to prevent. He had originally kept a copy of 
it. (Everybody in this business seems to have copies of every- 
thing except myself.) On the appearance of that paper Tilton 
went into a rage. It put him, he said, in a ' false position' before 
the public, and he said he would publish another card giving a 
statement something like what he afterward wrote to Dr. Bacon — 
that is, as I recollect the matter, declaring that I had committed 
an offence, and that he had been the magnanimous party in the 
business. It was necessary to decide what to do with him. 
Moulton strongly urged a card from me exonerating Tilton (as 
I could honestly do) from the authorship of the particular scan- 
dals detailed in his article to Mr. Bowen and alluded to in the 
covenant. 

" I said I would think it over, and perhaps write something. 
This was Friday or Saturday. The covenant appeared on Fri- 
day morning, and the alarm was sounded on me immediately that 
Tilton would do something dreadful if not restrained. On Sun- 
day I had made up my mind to write to Mr. Moulton the follow- 
ing letter, garbled extracts of which are given in Mr. Tilton's 
statement : 

'* ' Sunday Morning, June 1, 1873. 

" ' My dear Frank : The whole earth is tranquil and the 
heaven is serener, as befits one who has about finished this world- 
life. 

" ' I could do nothing on Saturday. My head was confused. 

" ' But a good sleep has made it like crystal. I have deter- 
mined to make no more resistance. Theodore's temperament is 
such that the future, even if temporarily earned, would be abso- 
lutely worthless, filled with abrupt changes, and rendering me 
liable at any hour or day to be obliged to stultify all the devices 
by which we saved ourselves. 

" ' It is only fair that he should know that the publication of 
the card which he proposes would leave him far worse off than 



5 1 6 BIOGRAPHY OF 

before. The agreement was made after my letter through you 
was written. He had had it a year. He had condoned his 
wife's fault. He had enjoined upon me with the utmost earnest- 
ness and solemnity not to betray his wife nor leave his children 
to a blight. I had honestly and earnestly joined in the purpose. 

" ' Then this settlement was made and signed by him [Tri- 
partite]. It was not my making. He revised his part so that 
it should wholly suit him, and signed it. It stood unquestioned 
and unblamed for more than a year. Then it zvas published. 
Nothing but that. That which he did in private, when made 
public excited him to fury, and he charges me with making him 
appear as one graciously pardoned by me ! It was his own de- 
liberate act, with which he was perfectly content till others saw 
it, and then he charges a grievous wrong home on me ! 

" ' My mind is clear ; I am not in haste. I shall write for the 
public a statement that will bear the light of the judgment day. 
God will take care of me and mine. When I look on earth it is 
deep night. When I look to the heavens above I see the morning 
breaking. But, oh ! that I could put in golden letters my deep 
sense of your faithful, earnest, undying fidelity, your disinte- 
rested friendship .! Your noble wife, too, has been one of God's 
comforters. It is such as she that renews a waning faith in 
womanhood. 

" ' Now, Frank, I would not have you waste any more energy 
on a hopeless task. With such a man as T. T. there is no possi- 
ble salvation for any that depend on him. With a strong nature, 
he does not know how to govern it. With generous impulses, 
the undercurrent that rules him is self. With ardent affections, 
he cannot love long that which does not repay but with admira- 
tion and praise. With a strong theatric nature, he is constantly 
imposed upon with the idea that a position, a great stroke — 
a coup d'etat — is the way to success. Besides these he has a hun- 
dred good things about him, but these named traits make him 
absolutely unreliable. Therefore there is no use in further trying. 
I have a strong feeling upon me, and it brings great peace with it, 
that I am spending my last Sunday and preaching my last sermon. 
Dear, good God, I thank Thee ! I am indeed beginning to see 
rest and triumph. The pain of life is but a moment ; the glory 
of the everlasting emancipation is wordless, inconceivable, full of 
breaking glory. O my beloved Frank ! I shall know you then, 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEE CHER. 5 1 7 

and for ever hold fellowship with you, and look back and smile 
at the past. Your loving H. W. B.' 

" There are intimations at the beginning and end of this letter 
that I felt the approach of death. With regard to that I merely 
refer to my previous statement concerning my bodily symptoms, 
and add that on this day I felt symptoms upon me. The main 
point is that I was worried out with the whole business, and 
would have been glad to escape by death, of which I long had 
little dread. I could see no end but death to the accumulation 
of torture, but I resolved to stop short and waste no more time in 
making matters worse. I felt that Mr. Moulton had better stop, 
too, and let the whole thing come out. I determined, then, to 
make a full and true statement, which I now make, and to leave 
the result with God. Mr. Tilton had repeatedly urged me, as 
stated in my letter, not to betray his wife, and I felt bound by 
every sense of honor, in case I should be pressed by inquiries 
from my church or family as to the foundations of rumors which 
might reach them, to keep this promise. By this promise I meant 
only that I would not betray the excessive affection which his 
wife, as I had been told, had conceived for me and had confessed 
to him. In reply to this note, which was calm and reserved rather 
than gloomy, Mr. Moulton wrote that same day a letter of three 
and a half sheets of copy-paper. He began as follows : 



a ( 



My dear Friend : You know I have never been in sym- 
pathy with the mood out of which you have often spoken as you 
have written this morning. If the truth must be spoken let it be. 
I know you can stand if the whole case was published to-morrow, 
and in my opinion it shows a selfish faith in God.' 

" Having proceeded thus far, Mr. Moulton seems to have per- 
ceived that the tone of this letter was rather likely to encourage 
me in my determination to publish the whole case than otherwise ; 
and as this was opposed to the whole line of his policy, he crossed 
out with one dash of the pencil the whole of this and commenced 
anew, writing the following letter : 

" ' Sunday, June 1, 1873. 
" ' My dear Friend : Your letter makes this first Sabbath of 
summer dark and cold like a vault. You have never inspired me 



5 I 8 BIOGRAPHY OF 

with courage or hope, and if I had listened to you alone my hands 
would have dropped helpless long ago. You don't begin to be in 
the danger to-day that has faced you many times before. If you 
now look at it square in the eyes it will cower and slink away 
again. You know that I have never been in sympathy with, but 
that I absolutely abhor, the unmanly mood out of which your 
letter of this morning came. This mood is a reservoir of mildew. 
You can stand it if the whole case were published to-morrow. In 
my opinion it shows only a selfish faith in God to go whining into 
heaven, if you could, with a truth that you are not courageous 
enough, with God's help and faith in God, to try to live on earth. 
You know that I love you, and because I do I shall try and try 
and try as in the past. You are mistaken when you say that 
' Theodore charges you with making him appear as one graciously 
pardoned by you.' He said the form in which it was published 
in some of the papers made it so appear, and it was from this that 
he asked relief. I do not think it impossible to frame a letter 
which will cover the case. May God bless you ! I know He will 
protect you. Frank.' 

" In the haste of writing Mr. Moulton apparently failed to per- 
ceive what he had already written. In the first instance, he wrote 
on one side of a half-sheet of paper, then, turning it over, inad- 
vertently used the clean side of that half-sheet for the purpose 
of the letter, which he sent in the final shape above given. But 
it will be seen that he deliberately, and twice in succession, re- 
affirmed his main statement that there was nothing in the whole 
case on which I could not safely stand. He treats my resolution 
as born of such morbid despair, as he had often reproached me 
for, and urged me strongly to maintain my faith in him. Tilton 
yielded to his persuasion, and graciously allowed himself to be 
soothed by the publication of a card exonerating him from the 
authorship of the base lies to which the tripartite covenant re- 
ferred. So once more, and this time against my calmer judg- 
ment, I patched up a hollow peace with him. 

" That I have grievously erred in judgment with this perplexed 
case no one is more conscious than I am. I chose the wrong path, 
and accepted a disastrous guidance in the beginning, and have 
indeed travelled on a * rough and ragged edge ' in my prolonged 
efforts to suppress this scandal, which has at last spread so much 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 51$ 

desolation through the land. But I cannot admit that I erred in 
desiring to keep these matters out of sight. In this respect I ap- 
peal to all Christian men, to judge whether almost any personal 
sacrifice ought not to have been made, rather than to suffer 
the morals of an entire community, and especially of the young, 
to be corrupted by the filthy details of scandalous falsehoods, 
daily iterated and amplified, for the gratification of impure curi- 
osity, and the demoralization of every child that is old enough to 
read. 

" The full truth of this history requires that one more fact 
should be told, especially as Mr. Tilton has invited it. Money 
has been obtained from me in the course of these affairs, in con- 
siderable sums ; but I did not, at first, look upon the suggestions 
that I should contribute to Mr. Tilton's pecuniary wants, as savor- 
ing of blackmail. Afterward I contributed at one time $5,000, 
which I came to do in this way : There was a discussion about 
the Golden Age. Moulton was constantly advancing money, as 
he said to me, to help Tilton. The paper was needy. One even- 
ing I was at his house. We were alone together in the back par- 
lor, and Moulton took out of his pocket a letter from . It 

was read to me, in which the writer mentioned contributions 
which he had made to Theodore. I understood from him, that 
the writer of this letter had given him some thousands of dollars 
down in cash, and then taking out two time-checks or drafts, 
which, as I recollected, were on bluish paper — although I am not 
sure of that. There were two checks, each of them amounting to 
one or two thousand dollars more, and I should think it amounted 
in all to about six thousand dollars, although my memory about 
quantities and figures is to be taken with great allowance ; but it 
produced the impression in me, that the writer had given him 
one or two thousand dollars in cash down, and, as the writer ex- 
plained in the letter, it was not convenient to give the balance in 
money at that time, but had drawn time-drafts, which would be 
just as useful as money ; and Moulton slapped the table and 
said, 'That is, what I call friendship,' and I was stupid, and said, 
' Yes, it was.' Afterward, when I got home, I got to thinking 
about it. ' Why,' said I, 'what a fool ! I never dreamed what he 
meant.' Then I went to him and said to him, 'I am willing to 
make a contribution and put the thing beyond a controversy.' 
Well, he said something like this: 'That he thought it would be 



5 2 O BIOGRAPH Y OF 

the best investment that ever I made in my life.' I then went 
to the savings-bank and put a mortgage of five thousand dollars 
on my house. I took a check which was given me by the bank's 
lawyer, and put it into the bank, and, on Moulton's suggestion 
that it would be better than to have a check drawn to his order, 
I drew the money in five-hundred-dollar or one-thousand-dollar 
bills — I have forgotten which, but I know that they were large, 
for I carried the roll in my hand — and these I gave into his 
hands. After the money had been given to Mr. Moulton, I 
felt very much dissatisfied. Finally a square demand and a 
threat was made to one of my confidential friends, that if $5,000 
more were not paid, Tilton's charges would be laid before the 
public. This I saw at once was blackmail in its boldest form, 
and I never paid a cent of it, but challenged and requested the 
fullest exposure." 

As we have seen, the " Woodhull scandal," at the secret insti- 
gation of Tilton, was published late in October, 1872. 

On the 2d of November Dr. Storrs wrote to Mr. Beecher : 

"My dear Beecher: I hear from different quarters that 
scandalous and annoying publications have been made about you. 

" If they are such as to trouble you, and if I can at any time 
be of any service to you, you know, of course, that you have only 
to intimate the wish to get all the help that I can give, on any 
occasion or in any way. Ever affectionately yours, 

"R. S. Storrs, Jr." 

At this time Mr. Beecher felt that he was bound in honor to 
be silent. It was not until the spring of 1873, when realizing 
that Tilton was industriously, in person, and through his friends, 
whispering tales against his character, and stimulating the pub- 
lication of the scandal, that he felt himself relieved from this ob- 
ligation. Then he published a card in the Brooklyn Eagle, em- 
phatically branding the stories as false and challenging the pro- 
duction of any evidence against him. 

But, at the time of Dr. Storrs's letter, to say a little and not 
say all, would be worse than silence, while to confide the whole 
matter to Dr. Storrs would necessitate repeating the statements 
against Tilton and Bowen, which would be a breach of the tri- 
partite agreement (a pledge which he alone had observed). He 
did not call on the doctor or answer the letter. He kept silent. 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECHER. 5 2 I 

A short time later (December 16) Tilton called upon Dr. Storrs 
with a friend, and read to him his so-called " true statement," 
which, as we have seen, he had drawn up to counteract, as he 
pretended, the Woodhull scandal. In this he asserted most 
positively his wife's innocence, and charged Mr. Beecher with 
"improper proposals." 

The effect of this interview played an important part in the 
subsequent events. We are not aware that Dr. Storrs ever went 
directly to his old friend and laid what he had heard before him, 
or indignantly denied the charges as a slander ; but, on the con- 
trary, almost in the face of his letter of November 2d proffering 
aid, he lent his ear to tales, carried by such a man as he knew 
Tilton to be ; and we very soon find him acting, in conjunction 
with Dr. Budington, as the recognized champion and adviser of 
Mr. Beecher's enemies ; his hostility, later on, ripening into the 
most intense personal bitterness, the fierce heat of which seemed 
to grow stronger rather than weaker as years rolled by, and did 
not seem to abate even when the cold hand of death fell upon his 
former friend. We have searched in vain for any reasonable justi- 
fication for this sudden change, from the most glowing friendship, 
to the most scorching enmity. We feel unwilling to believe the 
commonly accepted theory of jealousy, while the doctor's own 
suggestion that his feelings were hurt by Mr. Beecher's neglect 
of his friendly overtures, seems belittling to a man so gifted and 
refined, and one cast in so large an intellectual mould. 

We say that injured feelings were the reason suggested ; for 
when, about a year later, he appeared in open hostility to Mr. 
Beecher, and wondering friends inquired the reason, he stated in 
effect that he felt hurt by Mr. Beecher's neglect to even answer 
his friendly letter (of November 2, 1872), though admitting that 
it did not necessarily call for an answer. Later, after the publi- 
cation of the scandal, Mr. Beecher explained to both Drs. Storrs 
and Budington the reason for his silence, which explanation 
they then professed to accept as satisfactory.* On November 7, 
1873, a friend of both Dr. Storrs and Mr. Beecher called on the 
doctor, to whom he stated that while Mr. Beecher's enemies had 

* This occurred early in 1874, when Drs. Storrs and Budington were 
in conference with Mr. Beecher, seeking for some way of avoiding the com- 
plications between the three churches, which ultimately led to the Advisory 
Council of 1874. During this period they addressed Mr. Beecher in their 



52 2 REV. HENRY WARD B&ECHER. 

come to him, and he had not felt it right to refuse to hear what 
any one had to say, Mr. Beecher's friends had not come near him; 
that he hiftiself (Dr. S.) had never once commenced a conversatio?i 
with any one on this subject, and that he was sorry that he could 
not see this affair as Mr. Beecher's friends did, and wished he 
could believe that he was suffering for the sins of others. 

From his own statement, then, it would seem that he gave 
his ear to the tale-bearer, listening to all that was brought to him 
by Mr. Beecher's enemies, but he himself never once sought for 
information from Mr. Beecher's friends. 

About the first of June, 1873, Mr. Beecher had become satis- 
fied that there was no longer any use of trying to help Mr. Tilton, 
his eyes being at last opened to the fact, that Tilton had been 
deceiving him right along, and little by little had been dealing 
scandalous stories out to the public. He declared that he would 
stand it no longer, and when it was stated that Mrs. Woodhull 
had implicating letters from him he published the following card 
in the Brooklyn Eagle: 

"I have just returned to the city to learn that application has 
been made to Mrs. Victoria Woodhull for letters of mine sup- 
posed to contain information respecting certain infamous stories 
against me. I have no objection to have the Eagle state, in any 
way it deems fit, that Mrs. Woodhull, or any other person or 
persons who may have letters of mine in their possession, have 
my cordial consent to publish them. In this connection, and at 
this time, I will only add that the stories and rumors which for 
some time past have been circulated about me are grossly untrue, 
and I stamp them, in general and in particular, as utterly false. 

"Respectfully, Henry Ward Beecher. 

" Brooklyn, N. Y., June 30, 1873." 
At this time the stories afloat were vague and general. 

letters as " My dear Brother," joined with him in prayer asking for di- 
vine guidance out of the existing complications. Neither of them intimated 
any belief in the scandalous stories then afloat, but put the whole burden of 
their complaint on the ground of discourtesy, and, when Mr. Beecher ex- 
plained his reasons for silence and the pledge he felt himself to be under, 
expressed themselves as fully satisfied, and as late as 1876 their clerical 
friends understood that their hostility grew out of feelings hurt by fancied 
neglect, and not from a belief in any guilt on the part of Mr. Beecher. See 
Dr. Bacon's letterof February 27, 1876, page 559. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

After-Effects— Charges against Tilton — Advisory Council — Investigating 
Committee called by Mr. Beecher — Its Report — Dropping Mr. Moul- 
ton — Council called by Plymouth Church. 

IN October, 1873, formal charges were preferred against Theo- 
dore Tilton, by Plymouth Church, for slandering his pastor. 
He replied to the clerk of the church, that he was not, 
and for four or more years had not been, a member of the church. 
The church then voted to drop his name from the rolls, agreeably 
to the provisions of its manual, relating to such cases. 

Most of the sister churches were content that Plymouth 
Church should attend to her own affairs in her own way. Not 
so the Church of the Pilgrims (Dr. Storrs) and the Clinton 
Avenue Church (Dr. Budington). 

They felt themselves outraged by this action of Plymouth, in 
omitting to try the charges preferred against Tilton. 

Special meetings were called in these churches, and a com- 
mittee of seven appointed in each, to formulate, and send, a letter 
of remonstrance to Plymouth Church. After a considerable, but 
ineffectual correspondence between the churches, and consulta- 
tions between the pastors, looking to an amicable adjustment of 
their differences, the two dissatisfied churches called the " Advi- 
sory Council" of 1874, to advise them as to their course toward 
Plymouth Church. 

While the correspondence and conferences referred to were 
going on, a very serious difficulty broke out in Dr. Budington's 
church, which at one time threatened to split it asunder. A 
large number of influential members denounced the manner of 
calling the special meeting, at which the committee of seven was 
appointed, and by which the church was committed to its posi- 
tion of hostility to Plymouth, as being irregular, and in viola- 

523 



524 REV > HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 

tion of their own rules.* This led to a number of stormy meet- 
ings, in which great bitterness was felt and expressed on both 
sides. 

Mr. Beecher, instead of fomenting this difficulty — which might 
easily have been made the 'means of turning the tables upon his 
clerical critics, and forcing them from the attack to the defensive — 
or even sitting still, to await any advantages that might accrue to 
him or his church, came at once to Dr. Budington's relief. On 
January 12th he wrote to a prominent member of the latter's 
church, urging in the strongest terms that both the doctor, and 
the protestants, should seek for some intermediate ground on 
which they could meet in peace, and that the best men of the 
church should join to avert the catastrophe which seemed im- 
pending. He also wrote an earnest letter to Dr. Storrs, that he 

*They presented a formal protest, which, after rehearsing the action 
of their pastor in calling the special meeting, concluded: 

" WE PROTEST, 

" Because the committee was not appointed by the church; 

" Because its action has never been approved by the church; 

" Because the substance and form of the documents it has prepared 
have not been authorized even by the instructions given at irregular and 
invalid gatherings, until it was too late to offer criticism or objection; 

" Because these documents, neither authorized in advance nor subse- 
quently approved by this church, have apparently committed it to an atti- 
tude, and pledged it in advance to acts of antagonism and censure towards 
a near and beloved sister church, never contemplated or desired, still less 
resolved upon, by this church; 

" Because the question of discipline, originally raised as a matter of 
controversy, is one upon which the record of this church is such as to make 
it especially necessary that we should proceed with great circumspection 
when seeking to advise or censure other churches — it being our own practice 
to drop members for absence, without censure, at every annual meeting (Manual, 
sec. 6, art. 2), and the practice having extended in the past, as we are in- 
formed, to members at the time currently reported to be under grave charges. 

" The whole management of this case has misrepresented the spirit of 
this church, defeate'd its just right of self-government, suppressed the 
honest and free expression of individual opinion, and tended to subject 
the church to the control of a few members, without regard to the convic- 
tions of the remainder. 

" We, therefore, denounce the action of the committee as a dangerous 
attack upon Christian liberty and Congregational polity; and we declare it 
to be, and to have been from the beginning, null and void." 




Mr. Beecher and his Sister, Mrs. H. E. B. Stc 



525 



526 BIOGRAPHY OF 

should join with him in seeking the peace and unity of Dr. 
Budington's church. 

At the same time he wrote a long letter directly to Dr. 
Budington, in which, among other things, he said: 

" . . . I pray you not to think that I am intruding on your 
affairs, or that I am indelicate in offering to do anything I can. 
. . . Now let me assure you, my dear friend, that my first and 
last desire, as God sees my heart, is to see your church har- 
monious, and to see you more honored and firmly seated in the 
affection of your people than ever. I suppose I do not exag- 
gerate in saying that there is a large number of your people who 
are aggrieved, and that they, like yourself, stand upon a sincere 
conscience. Ought there not to be a way among those who have 
the humility of Christ to conciliate and to reconcile difficulties ? 
And, my dear brother, ought not you, as teacher and leader of 
this flock, to be a leader in self-abnegation, in tender regard for 
those who differ with you, in overcoming evil with good, in sub- 
duing opposition by love ? 

" Pardon me, I pray you. I long to see your power aug- 
mented and your name, now honorable, still more honored. . . . 
I count the integrity of your church and your continued use- 
fulness in it as a blessing, which cannot be lost without great 
blame somewhere, and if I can help you I will do it with all the 
earnestness of my nature ! I long for restored peace in our 
churches. 

" The peace which love brings is full of the fruits of the 
Spirit. I think much of you ; I pray for you in the watches of 
the night ! If I could help you effectually I should count it 
worth all that I have suffered ! I pray you do not put me from 
you, but let my heart be strengthened and comforted by the 
reciprocal love of yours. 

" I am, dear brother, 

" Truly yours, 

" Henry Ward Beecher." 

He also advised such of his friends in Dr. Budington's 
church as he met, to the same effect. Ultimately the storm blew 
over, though a feeling of soreness remained in the Clinton Avenue 
Church for a long time. 

On March 24, 1874, the Advisory Council convened in Dr. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 527 

Budington's church. Plymouth Church had been invited to be 
present at the council by pastor and committee, " to correct any 
statement of fact that may seem to them erroneous, and to fur- 
nish any further and special information the council may re- 
quest." 

To this Plymouth Church replied " that the calling of this 
ex-parte council to consider the affairs of a church which has 
not declined a mutual council is the consummation of a course 
of proceedings against which, as irregular and unwarrantable, we 
have felt bound to protest from the beginning. That we recog- 
nize in the statement, the letter-missive, and the invitation as in 
former communications addressed to us, a persistent attempt to 
put this church under accusation and on trial, and that we can- 
not accept the invitation of these two churches to appear before a 
council in the calling of which we have been permitted to take 
no part, in which we have not been offered the right of equal 
members, and in which we are not even allowed to be ordinary 
defendants, but only to be witnesses to correct errors and answer 
questions propounded to us." 

On the 28th the council made its "deliverance," but so like 
a Delphic oracle that neither its friends nor its foes seemed able 
to agree upon its exact meaning. 

As nearly as we can make out from the " deliverance " itself, 
and the comments made upon it by members of the council, it 
was to the effect : 1. That Plymouth Church was not en regie in 
its disposal of Mr. Tilton's case ; 2. That the two sister-churches 
were unwise and hasty ; and 3. That Plymouth Church should 
not be read out of fellowship. 

Very shortly after the adjournment of the council a series of 
letters were written by Dr. Bacon, of New Haven, and published 
in the Independent, which reflected very strongly upon Mr. Tilton, 
who, in the latter part of June, published a statement in which he 
made an open charge ; in this he declared that Mr. Beecher had 
committed an offence against him which he forbore to name. 
This was the first public charge made by Mr. Tilton. Up to this 
time the stories afloat were vague and indefinite, impossible of 
tracing to their source. 

Mr. Beecher was absent from the city when Tilton's statement 
was published, but, returning the next day, at once sent the fol- 
lowing to the gentlemen named therein : 



528 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

"Brooklyn, June 27, 1874. 

" Gentlemen : In the present state of public feeling I owe it 
to my friends, and to the church and the society over which I 
am pastor, to have some proper investigation made of the rumors, 
insinuations, or charges made respecting my conduct, as compro- 
mised by the late publications made by Mr. Tilton. I have 
thought that both the church and the society should be repre- 
sented, and I take the liberty of asking the following gentlemen 
to serve in this inquiry, and to do that which truth and justice 
may require. I beg that each of the gentlemen named will con- 
sider this as if it had been separately and personally sent to 
him, namely : 

" From the Church — Henry W. Sage, Augustus Storrs, Henry 
M- Cleveland. 

" From the Society — Horace B. Claflin, John Winslow, $. V. 
White. 

" I desire you, when you have satisfied yourselves by an im- 
partial and thorough examination of all sources of evidence, to 
communicate to the Examining Committee, or to the church, 
such action as then may seem to you right and wise. 

" Henry Ward Beecher." 

These names were selected after conference with the Examin- 
ing Committee of the church, most of them being suggested by 
that committee. Two of the gentlemen named were members of 
the Examining Committee, which immediately ratified the se- 
lection, and by formal vote made them a sub-committee of its 
own. 

After the committee had been organized and begun its exam- 
ination Mr. Beecher wrote and sent the following letter : 

" Gentlemen of the Committee : In the note requesting 
your appointment I asked that you should make full investigation 
of all sources of information. You are witnesses that I have in no 
way influenced or- interfered with your proceedings or duties. I 
have wished the investigation to be so searching that nothing 
could unsettle its results. I have nothing to gain by any policy 
of suppression or compromise. 

" For four years I have borne and suffered enough, and I will 
not go a step further. I will be free. I will not walk under a 



RE V. HE VR Y WA RD BEE CHER. 529 

rod or yoke. If any man would do me a favor, let him tell all 
he knows now. It is not mine to lay down the law of honor in 
regard to the use of other persons' confidential communications ; 
but, in so far as my own writings are concerned, there is not a 
letter nor document which I am afraid to have exhibited, and I 
authorize any and call upon any living person to produce and 
print forthwith, whatever writings they have from any source 
whatsoever. 

"It is time, for the sake of decency and of public morals, 
that this matter should be brought to an end. It is an open pool 
of corruption, exhaling deadly vapors. 

" For six weeks the nation has risen up and sat down upon 
scandal. Not a great war nor a revolution could more have filled 
the newspapers than this question of domestic trouble ; magni- 
fied a thousandfold, and. like a sore spot in the human body, 
drawing to itself every morbid humor in the blood. Whoever is 
buried with it, it is time that this abomination be buried below 
all touch or power of resurrection." 

The committee commenced their sittings on the 28th of June 
and did not complete their report until the 28th day of August. 
The committee requested the attendance of thirty-six witnesses, 
and endeavored to obtain such facts as were relevant to the in- 
quiry from all attainable sources of evidence. In their report 
they stated that "most of the persons named have attended as 
requested before the committee. One notable exception is Francis 
B. Carpenter. Francis D. Moulton promised to testify fully, but 
has failed to do so. He has submitted three short statements in 
writing to the committee, consisting chiefly of reasons why he de- 
clined to testify, and of promises to testify at the call of the com- 
mittee. The committee have called him three times, with the re- 
sults stated. In addition to the evidence of the persons named, 
we have examined a considerable number of letters and other 
documentary evidence which, in some way, were supposed to re- 
late to the subject-matter of inquiry. We have held in the prose- 
cution of our investigations twenty-eight sessions." 

Mr. Tilton appeared and presented a partial statement, finally 
refusing any further examination. Mrs. Tilton was examined, 
and most emphatically and solemnly denied the charge which her 
husband had made. Mr. Beecher was also examined ; the sub- 
stance of his statement we have already presented. While the 



530 BIOGRAPHY OF 

committee was in session, and on the 21st of July, Mr. Tilton 
published a statement in the Brooklyn Argus, in which for the 
first time he made the specific charge of adultery. Up to this 
time, in his private statements, he had charged " improper pro- 
posals " ; this statement he had made repeatedly, in confidence, to 
many different persons, and had incorporated in his so-called 
" true statement," which he had shown to several ; in this, in the 
most positive manner, he had denied that his wife had been 
guilty. The reason for this change of position will be made 
apparent later. 

The committee in their report, after exhaustively reviewing 
the evidence, concluded : 

" We find from the evidence that Mr. Beecher has never com- 
mitted any unchaste or improper act with Mrs. Tilton, nor made 
any unchaste or improper remark, proffer, or solicitation to her of 
any kind or description whatever. 

" If this were a question of errors of judgment on the part of 
Mr. Beecher, it would be easy to criticise, especially in the light 
of recent events. In such criticism, even to the extent of regrets 
and censure, we are sure no man would join more sincerely than 
Mr. Beecher himself. 

" We find nothing whatever in the evidence that should impair 
the perfect confidence of Plymouth Church or the world in the 
Christian character and integrity of Henry Ward Beecher. 

" And now let the peace of God, that passeth all understand- 
ing, rest and abide with Plymouth Church and her beloved and 
eminent pastor, so much and so long afflicted. 

" Henry W. Sage, 

" Augustus Storrs, 

" Henry M. Cleveland, I Committee of 

" Horace B. Claflin, f Investigation. 

" John Winslow, 

" S. V. White, 

" Dated Brooklyn, Aug. 27, 1874." 

This report, with its conclusions, was presented to the 
church on Friday evening, the 28th, and accepted with great 
enthusiasm by a unanimous vote, the immense throng, nearly three 
thousand in number, rising en masse when the vote was put. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 53 I 

The terrible struggle in silence had passed, and to Mr. Beecher 
the relief at feeling that he could speak out in his own defence 
was unutterable. He spoke of it often and strongly : 

" And what was most singular was that when the church 
came into the eclipse I came out of it. I had had my time when 
I was dumb and opened not my mouth, and was led as a sheep 
to the slaughter ; but when the trouble came upon the whole 
church, with its intense suffering, there came to me emancipa- 
tion. God was pleased to uphold me as I walked alone and in 
silence, and afterwards He gave me such relief that during the 
two or three years in which the church was shrouded in great 
anxiety I was filled with trust and courage, and was enabled all 
the time to lift up the church and carry it hopefully along from 
Sabbath to Sabbath." 

" . . . I have rolled off my burden ; I am in the hands of 
God ; I am certain of salvation and safety in God, and I do not 
give it any lower application ; but I am hidden in His pavilion, I 
am surrounded by His peace, and I have got back, through 
storms and troubles, to the simplicity and the quiet enjoyment 
which belonged to me many years ago. My thought, my feeling, 
and my soul run very quiet ; and it is the result, not so much of 
any visible and external thing, as that I am sure I am surrounded 
by the hand of my God. I live in Him, and He lives in me, and 
He gives me the promised peace." 

The publication of Mr. Beecher's statement (a short time prior 
to the committee's report) was as great a relief to Mr. Beecher's 
friends, as the opportunity to make it had been to him. Many 
who trusted him implicitly, believing that there was some reason 
for his silence, could not but wonder what it might be ; and when 
they learned that he had suffered reproach in silence, rather 
than open the doors to the vile flood which would deluge the 
land, bringing sorrow to hundreds of homes, unwilling to violate 
the pledge he had given to Tilton and Bowen until the former's 
treachery at last compelled him, their loving confidence and sym- 
pathy were only intensified. 

The clouds of mystery had been cleared away, and all was 
plain as noonday. We have room to quote but one of the many 
letters received, as an apt expression of the feelings produced 
by the statement. We give entire the letter of President Porter, 
of Yale College : 



532 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" Lake Placid, New York. 

"My dear Mr. Beecher : I have been on the point of writ- 
ing to you for the last few weeks, from time to time, to express 
my unabated confidence and my increasing sympathy for you in 
your great trial ; but I have refrained, knowing that you were 
too much occupied to listen to anything except necessary advice. 
But I have just read your statement, and am more than satisfied 
with it. It would be a slight thing to say that I believe it to be 
true. I do not read for myself, but for the world at large. I 
believe it will be accepted as true by all, except sons of Belial, 
and those who have been committed against you in decided par- 
tisanship. More than this : I think that it will secure you the 
warm sympathy of multitudes whom you have not reached, or 
only slightly, before this, and that you will be held in higher 
honor than ever for integrity of purpose and generosity of self- 
sacrifice, and that your example, while it will teach discretion 
from your weakness, will enforce, in a manifestly more impressive 
way, the dignity and strength of a willingness to suffer in silence,, 
that others might be spared. I believe the Lord will make 
your latter days better than in the beginning (as is said of Job), 
and if you are willing to stop doing twice as much as any mortal 
should attempt, your pulpit and pastoral influence will be more 
blessed than ever. 

" Most affectionately, your friend, 

"Noah Porter." 

Early in the sessions of the committee Mr. Tilton withdrew 
— as we understand, not liking to be followed up on cross-exami- 
nation — threatening to institute legal proceedings against Mr. 
Beecher, and, as preliminary thereto, published his statement 
of July 21. 

We have alluded to the fact that at this stage Tilton wholly 
changed the nature of his charge. In all the stories which he 
and Moulton had told to various friends at different times, and 
in the statements which he had prepared and shown in confi- 
dence, the charge was always "improper proposals" and an em- 
phatic assertion of his wife's innocence. Now he proposed to 
stake all on one cast of the dice. He would bring a suit, and, if 
he could get no more help, he would at least, so his vanity and 
Mr. Beecher's evil-wishers assured him, crush Mr. Beecher. In- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 533 

deed, he and Moulton were cornered, and must resort to some 
desperate measures or surrender themselves to everlasting in- 
famy. Had they been left to themselves, it is perhaps doubtful if 
they would have attempted so desperate a remedy, even in self- 
defence; but there were those, not a few, who egged them on, 
contributing to the expense of the suit, glad to keep up the attack 
on Mr. Beecher, provided only their names were not brought out. 

But an action at law would not lie for merely " improper 
proposals"; it must go further than that. The case must be re- 
constructed. In no published statement, up to this time, had 
Tilton made any definite charge. Now he would put his charge 
in such shape as would serve the purposes of a suit ; hence 
the statement of July 21, followed by a similar statement from 
Moulton published in the Graphic on August 21. The same 
day Tilton began his action against Mr. Beecher, placing his 
damages at $100,000. 

On the 3d of October both Tilton and Moulton were indicted 
for criminal libel by the Grand Jury of Kings County, on Mr. 
Beecher's complaint. (After the failure of the jury to agree in 
the civil suit, this was nolle-prossed.) 

Tilton's suit came on for trial the 6th of January, 1875, be- 
fore Judge Joseph Neilson, of the Brooklyn City Court. It is 
not necessary to go into the details of this trial. The same evi- 
dence, substantially, was presented as was received by the inves- 
tigating committee, and as appeared in the published statements. 
For six months the case occupied the time of the court and jury, 
the testimony covering several thousand pages of printed matter. 

The case was submitted to the jury the 24th day of June. 
For nine days the jury strove to reach an agreement, finally being 
discharged the 2d day of July, standing three for plaintiff and 
nine for defendant. 

We are informed, on the authority of one of the jurors, that 
several times they stood eleven to one in defendant's favor, and 
once all agreed on a verdict for defendant, when a juror unfortu- 
nately remarked that his son had wagered a large sum on a ver- 
dict for the defendant ; this statement split the jury at once, 
and from thence on they remained three to nine, until they were 
discharged. The case was never brought to trial again, the 
plaintiff wholly abandoning it. It is well known that after plain- 
tiff had abandoned his case, his leading counsel, Hon. William A. 



534 BIO GRAPH Y OF 

Beach, frequently and publicly declared that the trial of the 
cause had convinced him of Mr. Beecher's innocence, and that 
he felt as though they had been a pack of hounds trying to pull 
down a noble lion. Five years later he expressed similar views 
to the writer. 

In the course of the trial Mrs. Moulton took the stand against 
Mr. Beecher. With downcast eye, and hesitating voice, she cor- 
roborated her husband. 

Before the trial she withdrew from the public service of Ply- 
mouth Church, and became a constant attendant at the Church 
of the Pilgrims (Dr. Storrs). 

Plymouth Church could no longer tolerate her within its 
membership. It was fully believed that, under the coercion of 
her husband, she had committed perjury during the trial, and had 
grossly slandered her pastor. This would have been the ground 
of charges against her, but the church was advised that to try her 
on any charge based upon her testimony in court, while the suit 
was still pending (plaintiff's attorneys had renoticed the cause for 
a new trial, shortly after the disagreement), might involve them 
in a contempt of court, and, in any event, would be construed as 
an attempt to intimidate one of plaintiff's most important wit- 
nesses. But, since she had persistently absented herself from 
the services of the church, she could be dropped under the sev- 
enth rule of the church manual. She was accordingly notified 
of the proposed action of the church and invited to be present 
on the 4th of November. After hearing her defence through her 
legal counsel, her name was dropped from the rolls by a vote of 
the church. 

She at once demanded a mutual council, to be called by 
Plymouth Church and herself. Plymouth Church protested 
against Drs. Storrs's and Budington's churches participating 
therein, both of whom she had named, on the ground that they 
were obviously committed to her side and could not be impar- 
tial, but at the same time stated that they would go on with the 
council. Mrs. Moulton declined unless the protest were with- 
drawn. This being refused, she withdrew. 

About this time it was being rumored in certain circles, and 
notably in Boston, that Mr. Beecher and his church had some 
great secret that they were concealing from the world, and for 
this reason had declined the mutual council which Mrs. Moulton 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 535 

had proposed — forgetting that Mrs. Moulton was the one who had 
abandoned the council, and further forgetting that an opportunity 
had been offered to any who knew anything detrimental to Mr. 
Beecher, to testify against him, first before the committee, that sat 
for two months, and then in the trial, that lasted over six months. 
Friends of Mr. Beecher wrote to him from Boston of this feeling. 
He sent word at once to a friend to get the doubters together, 
and that his brother, Dr. Edward Beecher, would meet them and 
answer all questions. From this friend we received the following 
account of the meeting : 

" Immediately I set about the work of collecting those who, 
I thought, were honorable men, but misinformed into believing 
many things in the case which I knew to be false. ... I did not 
invite a man who had given signs of being a friend of your father, 
but I asked every man of weight in the community whom I had 
reason to believe was prejudiced against him, and every man, to 
whom I had access, who had expressed to my knowledge a judg- 
ment hostile to him. 

" The majority accepted. . . . My parlors were filled. . . . 
At the appointed hour a hack arrived from the depot, and out 
stepped your father, followed by his brother. He entered the 
parlors, and said in substance : 

" ' Gentlemen, I have been told that some of you feel that 
there is a lack of frankness on my part with reference to the 
painful matter in controversy, and that there is a desire, either 
on my part or on the part of my friends, to cover up and conceal 
facts. If you think so you are in error. Our first desire is to 
make everything known. But it is, we find, impossible to do so, 
because so many false rumors are flying about, and everything we 
say gets into the papers twisted awry. I have come here to beg 
you to ask any questions you desire. Do not spare my feelings. 
Do not be restrained by any consideration of delicacy. The 
more searching, the more crucial your questions are, the kinder 
you will be. I will answer any questioti you can ask pertaining to 
this 'affair.' 

" Hour after hour questions were asked. They were put 
one at a time, slowly. Some seemed but slightly relevant. Some 
made my blood boil to hear. Some seemed such as a judge 
might ask of a convicted criminal before pronouncing sentence. 
But every question was answered categorically, when that was 



536 REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 

possible, but always fully and exhaustively, so that the questioner 
pronounced himself entirely answered by the reply. 

" During the entire session there did not fall from your fa- 
ther's lips one impatient word, one harsh rejoinder. Not by a 
gesture did he give evidence that he suffered. Only the quick 
flush that came at times upon his cheek, showed the keenness of 
the torture caused him by this inquisition. 

" Before he left I asked each one present, privately, if there 
was any question he could think of, an answer to which would, 
in his opinion, throw light upon the matter, which had not been 
asked. In every case I received a negative reply." 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

After-Effects of the Conspiracy — Calling Council of 1876 — Principle of Se- 
lection — Mr. Beecher Cautions his Church — Bowen Reappears ; Pro- 
poses a Secret Tribunal — Mr. Beecher's Reply — Bowen Dropped by 
Plymouth Church — Deliverance of Council sustaining Plymouth — Mr. 
Beecher's Persecutors Denounced — Special Tribunal. 

BUT now the organized determination to break down Mr. 
Beecher's ministry and overthrow his church manifested 
itself by a new line of tactics. 

There were at this time a few members whose relation to the 
church was very peculiar, who were neither in it nor out of it, 
apparently, who did not ask, or who refused positively, to ta,ke 
letters to other churches, who were not amenable to the discip- 
line of the church, but who stood off, would not attend its 
meetings nor observe its ordinances, and who, when dealt with 
fraternally, in every way the church knew how, to procure 
them peaceably to sever their connection, and relieve the 
church from responsibility, refused to do it or neglected to do 
it ; and then, when it was proposed to drop them, without any 
reflection more than belonged to the nature of the case, they 
threatened, " If you drop us we will call a council." There 
were at one time four councils threatened, by four different mem- 
bers on these grounds. It soon became very clearly understood, 
that the tactics of the adversary were now, to wear out the pa- 
tience of the people, by a continuous series of councils, which 
would at last weary men from coming to a church where there 
was such incessant trouble. 

It was in consequence of these tactics, that Plymouth Church 
determined to end all such annoyances, by calling a National 
Advisory Council, that should look through its rules and prin- 
ciples, and its entire administration under them ; to have it 
of such magnitude, and made up of such churches and men, as 
that its deliverances would be final, making an end of all these 
controversies and giving the church solid ground to go on. 

537 



538 BIOGRAPHY OF 

Invitations were sent to one hundred and seventy-two 
churches, to be represented by pastor and delegate, and twenty 
ministers without charges, principally theological writers and 
professors in theological colleges. None were invited from New 
York City or Brooklyn, because of the general local feeling. 

The principal questions submitted were, substantially, whether 
Plymouth Church had acted contrary to the word of God or 
the principles of Christian justice in allowing to itself in any case 
any other mode of terminating membership than death, letters 
of dismission, and excommunication ? 

2. What course ought it to pursue towards those who per- 
sistently absented themselves from its services for various per- 
sonal reasons ? 

3. And towards those who were reported as having made in- 
sinuations affecting the character of other members, but who 
neither admit nor deny such reports ? 

4. Whether the church should have called a mutual council to 
investigate the charges against its pastor when so required by a 
member who submits no charges, and more than a year after a 
full investigation by the church, in which the pastor had been 
sustained by a unanimous vote ? 

5. Whether its course in the case of Mrs. Moulton had been 
wise and just ? 

6. Whether, in its maintenance of order, it had gone beyond 
its rights, so as to justly forfeit its claim to the confidence and 
fellowship of Congregational churches ? 

The letter-missive was dated February 1, 1876, and the coun- 
cil was called for the 15th. 

The principle upon which the council was made up, we can 
learn from a letter written January 28, 1876, by Mr. Beecher to 
an eminent doctor of divinity whose advice he wished respecting 
certain churches in his vicinity : 

" Allow me to say a word as to the principles of selection in 
this council. It will be gathered from the whole land, as far 
West as the Mississippi. It leaves out men committed to a pol- 
icy, or who are known to be working in league with adversary 
churches. But I wish to have honest men, capable of judg- 
ing upon facts and evidence, who are not so obstinate that 
they will not yield to conviction, or so tied to theories that 
they will look at everything under a bias. I don't care whether 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 539 

they like me or not, whether they agree with my views, whether 
they approve or disapprove of all the policy of Plymouth 
Church. I only want men who will be candid and who will act 
impartially." 

Quite a number attended who had been members of the prior 
council of 1874 ; and when the council met, a considerable ma- 
jority — their views having been acquired from newspaper reports 
— entertained grave doubts as to the regularity of Plymouth 
Church in its previous conduct. The effect which the evidence 
presented had upon their minds will appear later on. 

At the Friday night prayer-meeting just preceding the sitting 
of council, Mr. Beecher cautioned his people respecting their 
conduct during the council. 

" This church has for years been called to go through deep 
waters. For more than twenty years we had well-nigh unabated 
prosperity, and we were almost ready to boast that we had such 
wise methods of government and such signal presentations of 
truth as made our church life easy ; that we had not the vexa- 
tions which belonged to other churches ; and it is not unlikely 
that we may have become proud and self-sufficient. But certainly 
for the last few years God has been dealing with us as with sons, 
and has chastened us ; and it becomes us to bear in mind that 
the best gift of God to an individual or to a church is that kind 
of chastisement which works out trust, patience, long-suffering, 
kindness, and fruitfulness in labor. ♦— * 

"With these thoughts in mind, I wish to-night to speak a few 
words to you, and exhort you, even more signally in days that 
are to come, than you have in days that are past (for from my 
heart I can commend you in this respect), to carry out and enno- 
ble that patience, that fidelity, and that churchly love, which, un- 
der great difficulties you have shown. 

" My beloved, beware lest your intelligent judgment and con- 
scientiousness in the cause of Christ, be absorbed in the feeling of 
personal love and sympathy for your elder brother. Beware lest 
you be drawn into a kind of clannish feeling of anxiety for him. 
I know that I have your love and sympathy, and I know that I 
am prayed for by you. That suffices me ; but on your part it 
will be very bad for you to suffer this mere human feeling toward 
an individual to fill so large a place in your heart as that it may be 
said to fill your experience. You are a church of Christ set on a, 



54-0 BIOGRAPHY OP 

hill, and you cannot be hid ; and your business here is to mani- 
fest Jesus Christ to the world in such a way as to win them to a 
nobler life ; and you ought not to forget for what you are or- 
dained. I have tried to set you an example. I have endeavored 
to keep free from such states of mind, and from such person- 
ality, either as regards you or myself, as should interfere with the 
teaching and the reception here of the fullest and most edifying 
truths of our common faith ; and by the grace of God I have 
been enabled mainly to succeed in doing it. I doubt if any 
one hearing the sermons that have been preached here, with one 
or two exceptions, for the last five years, would from them suspect 
anything of that history through which this church has gone. 

" So far as you are concerned, I do not say that it is possible 
for you not to converse about our difficulties in your families, 
and with each other ; but you may do it too much ; and, there- 
fore, I wish to emphasize that your business as a church is not to 
take care of me, but to take care of and forward the work of the 
Lord Jesus Christ, your Head and Master. Do not, therefore, 
under the influence of amiable feelings, and warm sympathies, 
make the mistake of supposing that you are in a campaign of any 
sort, except that of rallying around about our appointed Leader. 
In the church, in your families, and in our mission schools, your 
business is to promote the teaching of Christ, for the awakening 
of men, and for the building up of all those who have undertaken 
the Christian life. 

" In pursuing this course, it behooves you to remember that 
under such severe and prolonged trouble, God expects of you, not 
only that you will be constant and faithful in His service, but 
that you will grow richer, more spiritual, and in every way more 
like Christ. You have had, and are having, a better opportunity 
for fulfilling the disposition set forth in the Gospel, than is given 
to one church in a hundred. God has been and is dealing with 
you as with sons. 

"We are on the eve of a memorable week. In 1874 a great 
council was called in Brooklyn to sit on our affairs, in which 
we were not to participate ; now we have called a council to act 
upon our own affairs, and in this we must needs participate ; and 
there are one or two things that I wish to say to you. 

" First, you that receive the brethren into your households, 
ought to set up in your hearts a sentiment of honor that shall 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 541 

have no downfall nor intermission. Those gentlemen that come 
to take part in this council come impartially. Their office is to 
hear, and to give such advice as the Lord may inspire in them, 
upon the facts that shall be presented. In some sense — not 
technically — they are as judges ; and you must not attempt in 
your homes to influence them, nor by your sympathy and kind- 
ness in the least degree to beguile them from the fullest and 
fairest discharge of their duty. Even if their judgment should 
be adverse to your convictions and mine, nevertheless it is very 
plainly a matter of Christian honor that they should be in your 
families, without in the least being biassed by social influences. 

" Secondly, when you shall attend the open meetings of the 
council (for it must needs be that largely the audience will be 
composed of members of this church and society), I beseech of 
you, by all that is honorable and by all that is gentlemanly, that 
there be, neither from the gallery nor from any other part of 
the house, first or last, the slightest exhibition either of approval 
or disapproval. I could wish that you might sit in your pews as 
if you were marble, though I know that your hearts are hot with- 
in you. That council ought to be able to sit in the midst of the 
congregation of this church and never hear a whisper nor feel a 
wave of influence exerted upon them. We called them that they 
might do their duty faithfully ; and I trust that you will com- 
mend yourselves in their sight by the most absolute abstention 
from any expression of thought or feeling in their presence. 

" In the third place, I beg of you, both now and when they 
shall have assembled, to bear them in your hearts in prayer, 
morning and night, before God. 

" If you will pray more for men you will have less occasion 
to do anything else ; and, in regard to this council, praying for 
them is a mode of exerting an influence upon them, which you 
may indulge in. Do you believe in God ? Do you believe in 
the Holy Spirit ? Do you believe in prayer ? Do you not be- 
lieve that it is in the power of God to descend into such a coun- 
cil, to bring a summer atmosphere into them and around them, 
and to lead them by the invisible hand of truth, of love, and of 
justice ? Pray much for them. 

" And in one last word let me say that while all this agitation 
is going on, while the papers are full of bickerings, full of fiery 
darts that fall like sparks from the smith's forge, remember that 



54-2 BIOGRAPHY OF 

your duty is in church work and in church life. So far as pos- 
sible, throw these unpleasant things off from your mind ; take 
care of your classes and schools ; attend faithfully to your mis- 
sion work ; live sweeter and holier lives in the family ; be better 
men and better Christians in the household ; do not let too much 
of the storm whistle through the cracks and crevices of your ex- 
perience — keep it out ; live individually and collectively near to 
Christ, and He will take care of me and of you. As He has done 
in times past, so will He do, and more abundantly, in the future, 
to the joy of our hearts and to the honor of His own great 
name." 

In the interim between the calling of the council and its con- 
vening, the case of Mr. Bowen came up before the church. For 
several years past, the old stories, which were supposed to have 
originated with him, had been set in circulation again, and quite 
recently a card appeared in a Brooklyn paper, over the signature 
of Mr. Bowen's son, in effect repeating these slanders. A com- 
mittee of Plymouth Church waited upon Mr. Bowen, but he re- 
fused to admit or deny that he was the originator of the stories — 
refused to make any statement or do anything. Ultimately he 
sent a letter to the committee (at the same time publishing it in 
the newspapers) making charges against Mr. Beecher, but in 
effect refusing to substantiate them, because he had not time to 
look up his evidence ; but offering to submit his charges to a con- 
fidential committee of three, provided he should not be called 
on to give names, and that the committee should report only 
their conclusions. 

When this letter was read at a church meeting Mr. Beecher 
arose and said : 

" I do not propose to argue this question to-night — it is not 
fit that I should do it. I only propose to say one or two words 
on the matter ; and one is : if for the last fifteen years and more, 
Mr. Bowen has been in possession of such facts as he now al- 
leges in his letter, that he has, and never has mentioned them 
to me, nor communicated them to any officer of this church, 
nor in anywise brought them to the knowledge of the church 
itself, he deserves to be expelled from the church for a violation 
of his covenant. If I am what he alleges me to be, and have 
been what he alleges I have been, and he knew it, and permitted 
it, without a word of warning to me or to this church, he has com- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 543 

mitted a crime against the church, and against morality ; and if 
his allegation is not true, but is a lie, then he is guilty of one of 
the blackest crimes that ever emanated from the bottomless pit — 
and, before God, I pronounce the allegations that he has, made 
to be utterly false. 

" Further let me say that when Mr. Bowen, being called upon 
to state what these facts are, and what are the proofs of them 
which he has in his possession, pleads that he is upon trial, and 
that he has not time to look them up, what are we to think of 
such a plea ? He had time to write that letter, and to charge me 
with being a criminal before the public of this continent, and, 
having had time to represent me as a monster, and to publish that 
representation in the newspapers, now, when he is asked, ' What 
is your evidence ? ' he has not time to produce it ! Ought not that 
to have been thought of before he made the charge public ? 

" I have another word to say, and that is in regard to the 
tribunal which he proposes — a tripartite committee, a committee 
composed of three persons — on condition that in their presence 
he may hide names, and that then their judgment be given out in 
adjudication of the question. Now, I say that no secrecy shall 
rest on this matter. I do not say that I would not in some re- 
spects be willing to go before such a committee, but this I say : 
Nothing on this subject shall be kept secret. If this matter is 
not explored to the bottom it shall be because my will is set 
aside. I do not propose that Mr. Bowen shall hide himself, nor 
will I permit anything to be hidden about me, by having the 
matter referred to any three gentlemen who shall only let out 
what they think. What they think will not satisfy you ; what 
they think will not satisfy me ; and since the allegations have 
been made public through the newspapers, and Mr. Bowen's 
name is attached to them, he has got to face the facts, he has got 
to produce the evidence. And as for myself, I have only this to 
say : I pronounce all the insinuations and allegations he has 
made as false, and, with Almighty God and the judgment day be- 
fore me, I arraign him as a slanderer and a liar." 

Mr. Bowen produced no evidence to sustain his charges, and 
the church subsequently voted that they could dispense with him. 

On the 15th of February the council, the largest of its kind 
that had ever been convened in this country, met. Dr. Bacon 



544 BIOGRAPHY OF 

was chosen moderator ; ex-Governor Dingley, of Maine, and 
General Erastus N. Bates, assistant moderators. 

While the questions presented to the council were principally 
as to church regularity, the sixth also opened up the question of 
the action and result of the Investigating Committee referred to, 
and, generally, the whole conduct of the church with reference to 
its pastor ; this naturally led to questions being put to Mr. Beecher 
personally as to the policy he had followed respecting the scandal. 

Both Mn Beecher and the committee of the church invited 
the fullest questioning on any point that could be suggested ; 
urged the council to invite Drs. Storrs and Budington to be 
present, to call Mrs. Moulton's counsel, and to examine Mr. 
Bowen — all of which the council did, Drs. Storrs and Buding- 
ton declining to attend. 

For eight days — three sessions each day, morning, afternoon, 
and evening — Mr. Beecher and the committee stood as targets for 
the questions of the council. 

We present some of Mr. Beecher's replies, as throwing light 
upon himself, and his actions, during the origin and growth of the 
scandal. 

To the question why he had remained silent during the earlier 
rumors set afloat by Bowen and Tilton, and did not demand an 
investigation, he said : " This was the reason. The relations 
which subsisted between me and my people were those of very 
strong personal affection. I know all of you must be very much 
beloved by those whom you attend in sickness, to whom you 
preach, and whose troubles and sorrows you console. My God 
has given me a sympathetic nature, ardent and loving. I attract 
friends to me, and usually I hold them. I was dear to very 
many ; and it has been the honor, as it has been the glory, of my 
recollection, that I have been beloved by those, to be beloved by 
whom is itself enough witness and enough honor. And it was 
because, from various reasons, intimations were made pointing to 
one, and another, and another, that I saw that, if I were to rush 
recklessly out after every rumor of this kind, which came insidi- 
ously and circuitously, I should bring a torrent of publicity and 
reproach upon one, two, three, many persons ; and the question 
with me was, not simply what I ought to do, but, ' Will you, for 
your own vindication, bring on an investigation, and project into 
publicity those persons who have the rights, the sanctities, and 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 545 

the delicacies of the domestic circle around about them ? ' And 
now you see, when the first of these rumors has been brought 
into public notice, how it has spread and gone, like a fire on a 
prairie, all over the United States ; and you see just what I ap- 
prehended would be the case. Having connected with me, in my 
relations to public affairs, parties and discussions of many sorts, I 
knew that the connection with my name in one of these various 
matters, under the circumstances, would proclaim it throughout 
Christendom ; and the question with me was : ' Will you stand 
patiently for God to vindicate you from these suggestions, putting 
to shame those that accuse you falsely ; or will you vindicate 
yourself by bringing sheeted publicity, and lurid investigation, 
on one, on two, or on scores ? ' I chose the course of silence." 

In reply to another question : 

" Now, I wish to hear the other part of the question, sir — 
whether I am willing that Dr. Storrs and Dr. Budington should 
state anything that they know — any facts ? I should like to know 
how much longer a man need be at the focus of a solar micro- 
scope, with all the sun in the heavens concentrated upon him for 
six months, and everything that could be raked, from the North 
Pole to the South Pole, and round the earth forty times cir- 
cuited, raked up and brought in, and be willing to have it raked 
up and brought in again ? How much longer does a man want to 
have his willingness to have the truth come out, vindicated ? If 
there is any man on earth that has anything to say — that he wants 
to say — if there is any man on earth that has anything to say to 
my detriment, I here and now challenge him to say it ! I go fur- 
ther than that. If there be any angel of God, semi-prescient and 
omniscient, I challenge him to say aught. I go beyond that, and, 
in the name of our common Redeemer, and before Kim who 
shall judge you and me, I challenge the truth from God Him- 
self ! And what is all this going to do ? To-morrow morn- 
ing it will be said in the local journals : 'Well, Mr. Beecher — 
how rhetorically he managed the matter ! ' And it will be put in 
the religious papers : ' Oh ! yes ; that was a very plausible state- 
ment at the time, but — but — ' And I am in judgment between 
two devils, 'But' and 'If.' Nothing that I say is taken to be 
true, and I am put upon a perpetual trial of my veracity ; al- 
though I am willing to be tried, I don't disguise from myself, sup- 
pressing every sentiment of natural honor that pertains to a gen- 



546 BIOGRAPHY OF 

tleman — I know perfectly well this whole process is a continuous 
trial and crucifixion of every sentiment of honor and every sensi- 
bility of my soul, and that I am questioned, and questioned, and 
questioned, and questioned, as I have been, through months and 
years, on the supposition that the truth has not been got out. 
And I suppose it will be so to the end of my life. I don't look 
with any great hope for the result of this council. I don't look 
for any hope from the result of any council or tribunal. I think 
there is hope in the grave, and beyond ; but for me, I expect to 
walk with a clouded head, not understood, until I go to heaven, 
and that is not far off — that is not far away. And I am content 
to bear just that lot that my dear Lord puts on me. He knows 
what is best. I have accepted it. Though the natural man re- 
bels once in a while and bubbles out, yet grace in the end puts it 
down. But I am content to walk so. All my sorrow is that the 
preciousness of the Gospel, which it is given to me to preach, is 
hindered somewhat by this trouble ; but to work for Christ, and 
to save men, is my calling, and not to vindicate myself." 

Again, referring to the perverse malignity that had character 
ized his enemies : " I said, and now I repeat it, that this church 
and its pastor have been systematically, studiously pursued with 
perversions and what cannot be considered other than deliberate 
falsehoods. In some quarters, whatever has happened has been 
so uniformly twisted, as to indicate what I supposed to be the 
truth — namely, an organized movement to pervert everything and 
destroy that influence which I formerly had with the common 
people of America, and then to bring vexations, so many and so 
frequent, upon the church as to disintegrate its patience, and thus 
to leave me alone without anything. And I will say that the 
backbitings, the whisperings, the innuendoes, the studious shut- 
ting of the understanding to all fairness, when I make statements, 
and the opening it wide to all partisan misrepresentations, when 
those statements were reported otherwise, have been such as to 
open a new chapter in my mind of human experience, and to 
carry me far back towards the old doctrine of total depravity.'' 

In the course of one of the sessions the pastor of a Boston 
church, referring to the unjust rumor, current in certain quarters, 
that since the scandal had come out the church and its pastor 
had not brought out all the facts, that there were rumors of some- 
thing yet unpublished, and that they were now unreasonably re- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 547 

fusing to submit the matter before some new tribunal, expressed 
his surprise at hearing the statement of the committee, and won- 
dered that Mr. Beecher and his church had not been better un- 
derstood by the public. To this Mr. Beecher replied : 

"Gentlemen, you won't suspect me of any disrespect to you, 
but I want to put a home question to you. This church has 
been occupied in publishing to the world for the last three years, 
a statement of those facts that have set you perfectly aghast, as 
novel and wonderful. What are you going to do when the repre- 
sentatives of the morality and the intelligence of this nation won't 
read a word that is published, of the results of the church in- 
vestigation, and the court investigation, but, coming up after they 
have been published for months, yet are amazed at the simple 
statement of that, which has been in the newspapers and the court 
records, during all this time ? Are we forced not only to forge 
wedges of intelligence, but use clubs to drive them into your 
heads ? We have been doing everything that man could do, in 
opening, in publishing, and, as far as it took any definite shape, 
in meeting. But you cannot hunt a stench ; you can an arrow, 
but a smell you can't. And therefore these odorous beasts are 
going up and down the streets, castinf some venom and some 
odor ; we can't spend the time of a Cnristian church for ever 
hunting these things. Am I to run after every rat in creation ? 
Am I to run after every leech, and worm, and every venomous 
insect ? 

" You have a right to demand of us that we shall meet accusa- 
tions when they come up responsibly stated. Did we not meet 
them the moment the ' Bacon letter ' appeared ? Within the time 
that was necessary to bring me back from the country and back 
to the city, did we not instantly meet them with a call for investi- 
gation in the church ? Was not that investigation made with a 
proclamation to the world to bring in everything known ? It was 
not zeal covering me, it was dissection, and when the investiga- 
tion had been made it was published to the world. No sooner 
had it been completed than we all distributed ourselves in the 
country for rest. When we came back I went instantly to a civil 
court. That trial was noticed for action immediately on my re- 
turn, and I continued for six months in that court-room, and 
every paper in the United States helped distribute the information 
of the facts that were then disclosed. In July or August the 



548 BIOGRAPHY OF 

court adjourned and we went back into the country. We had 
scarcely come back again from the summer vacation, before we 
took the matter up again in regard to members of this church, 
and issued process upon them, and this process has been that 
which has filled, the whole time since, the newspapers and the 
clerical mind of the country. Where has been the time and space 
in which we could institute anything else ? Have we not been 
busy ? Or shall we stay up all night, and turn Sunday into a 
judicial day, and, investigate somewhat more ? 

" I don't know — as long as God knows, and my mother, how 
it is, I have come to about the state of mind that I don't care for 
you or anybody else. Well, you know that is not so : I do care 
and I don't, and I do again and then I don't — just as I happen 
to feel. I am tired of you ; I am tired of the world ; I am tired 
of men that make newspapers, and men that read them ; I am 
tired of a community that has not a particle of moral reaction. 
I am tired of an age which will permit the newspapers to be 
flooded, and to make themselves the common sewers of filth and 
scandal ; I am tired of a community that can read them, and 
read them, and read them without revolting. I am tired of wait- 
ing for an honorable man that shall stand up at last, and say, in 
the name of honor and manhood, ' This is outrageous ! ' 

" And yet I am going to bear it, and I am going on preaching, 
and I am going to preach here, and when I am shut up here I 
don't know where I shall preach ; but I don't believe that I shall 
live long after I have stopped preaching. But what I want is to 
do God's work, and if it is necessary to have a reputation in An- 
dover, or a reputation in Chicago, before I am to preach, I may 
as well stop at once. But my own feeling about it is this : I am 
entrusted with the tidings of salvation to dying men, and the first 
wish of my heart, is not my good name nor my reputation. Dear 
as they are to me for my children's sake, and for the sake of my 
family, after all there is a Name that is better to me than mine, 
there is a Name above every other name — for my trouble has 
brought me very near to it, and the glory of Christ. God's glory 
and God's delicacy, and sweetness and love were never made so 
apparent to me, as since I have felt the need of them in other 
folks. 

"... I will answer as regards any paper that is in the pos- 
session of any man, woman, or child on this continent, or on the 



REV, HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 549 

sea, or on the land, and beyond the sea ; anybody in heaven and 
anybody in hell, that has any document that I have ever written, 
or any information that touches me in any manner, I hereby give 
my permission to them to produce it, and I challenge them to 
produce it, and if it is anything that will throw light on me and 
inculpate me, I demand, by every consideration of honor, truth, 
and justice, that it be delivered now and here, or that for ever 
after they and everybody shall hold their peace." 

At another time, referring to the burden of expense in the 
civil trial alone : 

" I think people look upon my being tried as if it was a game 
of battledore and shuttlecock, and as if being tried was nothing 
but being tossed through the air by two clever fellows, and as if 
I ought to like it. And any expression of preference of one tri- 
bunal over another, or any arithmetical expression of how many 
times I would like to be tried, is said to be covering up some- 
thing or other. I would like to state to the brethren here that 
my expenses for the trial of six months, and expenses of living 
for the year, amounted to $118,000. I do not feel disposed to go 
through a great many more such trials, but I trust you won't 
think it is because I want to cover anything up, unless it is my 
pockets. And if there is anybody who wishes to take my place 
in the matter, and will pay the expenses, I will give up most 
cheerfully and let them represent me. I ought to state further 
in regard to these expenses — I state it in love and honor to my 
dear friend Shearman — that he would not take one penny for the 
w T hole year's service, and that, aside from serving freely without 
money and without price, he so absolutely abandoned his busi- 
ness, that his income was cut down nine-tenths or more of what 
he was accustomed to receive, and that, great as my expenses 
were, relatively, his were double mine, for the love-service which 
he performed during this time." 

On the 24th of February the " result of council was an- 
nounced." 

In this the council sustained Plymouth Church on every point, 
at the same time recommending a few changes in its manual 
which it was thought might save complication in the future.* 

* Most of them had at the time been proposed by the church, and all 
were promptly adopted. 



550 BIOGRAPHY OF 

m 

The council further advised in its " result" : 

"In view of the fact that the pastor of this church has de- 
manded that his accusers be brought to face him, and has invited 
such investigation as this council may think desirable, for the 
peace and prosperity of the churches, and in order to protect 
Plymouth Church from further vexatious proceedings, this coun- 
cil advises this church to accept and empower a commission of 
five members, to be created by a committee of three, hereinafter 
specified, out of the twenty men hereinafter named ; the duty of 
which commission shall be to receive and examine all charges 
against the pastor which they may regard as not already tried. . . . 

" We hold the pastor of this church, as we and all others are 
bound to hold him, innocent of the charges reported against him 
until substantiated by proof." The time within which such 
charges should be preferred was limited to sixty days. 

This tribunal was thereafter appointed, and waited a year. 
It is perhaps needless to say that no charges were preferred. 

In the closing addresses of the council to the church the 
speakers expressed more freely the prevailing personal feeling. 

We quote Dr. Wellman, the first speaker : 

" I would not depreciate at all the intense interest with which 
many of us, strangers to the pastor, have looked upon him, and 
watched him, and heard him as he has appeared before us and 
addressed us. But while I say that, I must say, for one, that I 
watched with still keener interest the men associated with him, 
and who came upon this platform to present this case — the mem- 
bers of the Plymouth Church Investigating Committee. And 
why have I watched these men with such intense interest ? Now, 
all men know the power of this man of God to persuade men ; 
and some of us, who live far away, have been told again and again, 
that this pastor had such persuasive power, that he could man- 
age all his men here, and make them believe anything and do 
anything, and therefore it did not follow that, because this great 
church and people were so loyal to their pastor, that he was an in- 
nocent and pure man. Now, your loyal and magnificent devotion 
to your pastor, is your praise all over this land and all over this 
world. We had not seen you ; we did not know what kind of men 
were associated with this man of God ; and it was possible, we 
thought, that they were weak men, who could be blinded and 
could be made to believe anything. I have watched these men, 



REV. HEttRY Ward beech er. 551 

• 
and I aver to-night that they are not men of feeble mind, and 
not men who would have an impure pastor here if they knew it, 
and not men to be managed by any pastor ; and it has been the 
joy of my heart to find that such men have been associated, dur- 
ing these years of your darkness and sorrow, with this man of 
God. 

" It has been said that this pastor is managing this council. 
Somehow people all over the world have great confidence in the 
managing power of this man. So far as I can see, he is the very 
last man to manage anybody ; and as to his managing this coun- 
cil, I wish to say here and now, once for all, and I wish it to go 
through you to all the world, that he has managed us — just as 
that man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and robbed, and 
stripped, and wounded and thrown aside and left half-dead, man- 
aged that other man who came to his distress and bent over him 
and poured oil upon his wounds and dressed them, and took him 
up and brought him to the inn and cared for him. So this man 
has managed us, and in no other way. I had no acquaintance 
with him ; I never spoke to him until the last week ; but, coming 
here, I have been greatly touched — indeed, nothing has touched 
me more than the manner in which this pastor has laid bare his 
heart to us, and asked us to search him through and through, his 
heart and his life, and tell him if there be anything w r rong in him 
or in what he has done. He has done this again and again, be- 
fore the council, and it has made me feel, for one, that there was 
no need of searching such a man. I have noticed repeatedly, 
during the presentation of this case, that the pastor of this church 
seemed to be living two kinds of lives, one a sad one, and the 
other a life of earnest duty. Underneath his work and his ad- 
dresses to us, there came out every now and then a sad under- 
tone, as if he felt that he must live and toil for all the rest of his 
life, under this dark cloud of suspicion and constant misrepresen- 
tation, and with these constant dagger-rents in his heart. Now, I 
do not believe that he is to live the rest of his life under this 
cloud and this burden of trouble. Ever since this council was 
by itself, I have seen out of all this darkness a bright morning 
coming, and never has that morning seemed so near and so close 
as it does to-night." 

And from the address of Dr. Sturtevant, president of Illinois 
College : 



552 BIOGRAPHY OF 

u What now are we to expect ? What is to be the result of 
this ? This : Brother Beecher and his church are to be assured 
from this hour that they have our confidence. He is to be re- 
garded as innocent until charges of guilt have been tabled and 
substantiated — not floating rumors, not the slime of the crawling 
serpent, but charges clear, definite, with all needed specifications 
of names and dates and witnesses, charges behind which there 
stands a responsible endorser ; and while he stands thus, we ex- 
tend to him the hand of our hearty fellowship, and entire con- 
fidence, until those charges are tabled and established. That 
confidence begins here and now ; and it enables him to say, and 
his people to say : ' All these rumors, these innuendoes, these 
floating stories that circulate through the press, and through the 
ten thousand channels in which rumor flows, are worthy of no 
account until they are backed by responsible men, who are will- 
ing to face that commission, and to attempt to prove those 
charges before that commission ; and if men continue to rail and 
continue to tell horrible stories of what they know, how it was 
ten years ago, and seven years ago, and five years ago, etc., and 
what this man said and what that woman said — if they continue 
to say such things, believe them not. They are just as respec- 
table as Shimei was, when he went along the hill and cursed 
David.' " 

From parts of Mr. Beecher's address to the council at the 
close, after the " result " had been announced, we get a clearer 
insight of his feelings, and of his life during these troublesome 
times, than from most anything else that he has uttered : 

" It has come to pass that for so many years I have read of 
myself and heard of myself, that I have ceased in some moods to 
have any actual self, and am projected as an idea before my own 
mind. And if I shall therefore speak somewhat fieelyj after the 
manner of men, about myself, I wish you to consider it a part of 
those metaphysics which Dr. Porter says are very bad. I have 
often read as if I were reading in a novel about the bad hero, and 
waked up from the dream and grimly laughed as I asked myself : 
'Is it me that they mean? Is it possible for a man to live as long 
as I have, and as openly, and to have acted upon so large a thea- 
tre, and been agitated by such world-shaking events, and be so 
utterly misconceived ? ' I have had the reputation of being a 
frank man. But it may be true that I am a man of very cautious 



REV. HEXRY WARD BEECH ER. 553 

speech, and may therefore sometimes not have expressed myself 
intelligently, though at other times I have had the reputation of 
being able to make myself understood ! Nevertheless it has come 
to pass that I supposed myself to have been more thoroughly can- 
vassed, and construed in no very enviable light, than it has befall- 
en to any of my contemporaries. I am very sorry that it should 
be so. I have no love of being a hero, and I have still less of 
being such a hero as I have been made to be. I tell you that to 
hear men talking whether I am or am not guilty makes the very 
mother-thought shiver within me. For I have sensibility — I am 
open to the keenest sense of truth and purity, and honor and 
right; and to be held before a jury, and to sit six long months, and 
to have rained upon me perjury and professional abuse, and to 
feel that over the whole broad extent of this land, I was the focal 
point on which journalism was expending itself, and that, too, not 
as to whether I was Republican or Democrat, not whether I was 
orthodox or heterodox, not whether this or that system expound- 
ed was rightly held, but whether I was an ineffable culprit ! I 
have not been hunted as an eagle is hunted ; I have not been 
pursued as a lion is pursued ; I have not been pursued even as 
wolves and foxes. I have been pursued as if I were a maggot in a 
rotten corpse. And do you suppose that it is in human nature to 
go through that, through months and through years, and not feel 
it ? And yet, if it please God, who has enabled me to go through 
the desert and the Red Sea, that I should go on, God is my 
judge, that I am both willing and I am able to go on again an- 
other five years ; for I can do all things, Christ strengthening me, 
and the life that I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the Son 
of God, who loved me never so much as now. 

" At some time it may be in my power to defend myself on 
every count and charge. It may be in my power, at some time, 
with dates and circumstances to expound the reason of my con- 
duct. I am the child of a noble mother and of a noble father, 
and I was brought up in an austere morality and in a pure and 
unblemished household, with a most reverent honor for truth, for 
duty, for love. And to me has been given a nature for which, 
whether it be prudent or whether it be not, I am not question- 
able. When they rebuke the vine for throwing out tendrils and 
holding on to anything that is next to it, whether it be homely or 
handsome, whether it be dry or full of sap, then they may re- 



554 biogra ph y OF 

buke me. When you shall find a heart to rebuke the twining 
morning-glory, or any other plant that holds on to that which is 
next to it, you may rebuke me for misplaced confidence ; you 
may rebuke me for loving where I should not love. It is not my 
choice ; it is my necessity. And I have loved on the right and 
on the left, here and there, and it is my joy, that to-day I am not 
ashamed of it. I am glad of it, and if I had my life to live over 
again, and were to choose between a cold caution, calculating 
every step, without trust and confidence in man, I would, with 
all its liabilities, choose to be generous, to be magnanimous, and 
to be trustful, and to lean though some should step aside and 
let me fall to the ground. And let me say further that I was 
brought up in a household where the name of woman was only 
next to the name of saint, and with good reason I always thought 
it should stand there. The memory of my mother has been to 
me, what the Virgin Mary has been to a devotee of the Roman 
Church. She has been part and parcel of my upper life — a star 
whose parallax I could not take, but nevertheless, shining from 
afar, she has been the light that lit me easier into the thought of 
the invisible and the presence of the Divine. My sisters I need 
not speak of. My associations have been with women who have 
left upon my mind an indelible impression of honor, of rever- 
ence, and of affection ; and all that I have gone through, and all 
that I have suffered at the hands of those that are of another 
school, has not changed, nor in the slightest degree blurred, the 
sense that I have of the dignity and the sacredness and the 
beauty of womanhood. And when I have stood upon the thresh- 
old of what seemed to me — knowing the secret elements that 
were in it, and how a cloud no bigger than a man's hand might 
roll up and cover the whole heaven — when I have stood and 
looked out upon what might come, what misery might be, I have 
said, and God knows the sincerity and the depth of it, 'It is bet- 
ter for me — if it be possible — it is better for me to stand, and be 
misunderstood than that there should be suffering over so wide 
a circle,' as I believed there would be. And that there have been 
so many heart-aches, that there have been so many, whose faces 
I never saw, that have been bathed in tears, that there has been 
even the eclipse of faith that has been mentioned in many, only 
shows how much would have been saved to humanity, if it had 
been possible that that policy of suffocating a domestic trouble, 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 555 

and keeping it in the origin of it, had been followed out and hon- 
orably observed. The fire, that at the first is only so much that 
you can stamp it out, may, by fanning winds or reckless hands, be 
spread beyond your reach, and the whole city deluged with flame, 
the whole prairie be sheeted with fire. That which, in its be- 
ginning, seems quite manageable, it seems to me policy not only, 
but duty, to suppress and maintain in its seclusion ; for if it 
bursts out it will know no bounds and no termination. The en- 
deavor I do not regret ; the ill success of it I do. 

"But having gone through it all, my only question — that is, 
my only deepest question — is, Has it wrenched you from the 
foundations of a true manhood ? Do you believe in God ? Do 
you trust in the Lord Jesus Christ ? Do you live by the commu- 
nications of the Holy Ghost ? Is the higher part of your nature 
in commerce with God ? I look around among men and I say, 
Has it made you hating ? Has it made you jealous ? Has it 
made you a misanthropist or a misogynist? Are you sound — 
sound in your chest, sound in your heart ? Are you a man ? Do 
you love men ? Do you trust men ? Do you honor women ? 
Do you trust them ? Are you willing to labor for them ? Are 
you willing to suffer for them ? I think I may say, without any 
fear, I do believe that I live in the Spirit of God and very near to 
Him, and in regard to my feelings toward mankind there does 
not live the man on the face of this earth that I would harm if I 
had him in my power. There is not that human creature — I 
know it — there is not that human creature that lives, that I would 
not rather help than hurt. There is not that creature that lives 
for whom I would not bear suffering, if I could save him from 
greater suffering. I have tried to live in the spirit of Christ, who 
wrought our joy by His sorrow, who saved us by sacrificing 
Himself. I have endeavored to so live. And now let me say- 
further than this, that while I make these asseverations of the 
honesty of my intent, and while I mean to convey, in the strong- 
est language, my consciousness of innocence and rectitude, and 
honor and purity, I do not mean to say that I have always 
been wise, and still less that I should advise another to at- 
tempt to walk the path that I have walked, or that I have al- 
ways kept my temper, or that I have always restrained my 
tongue. These, which I will not call infirmities, if you please to 
call them wrongs or sins — name them yourselves, and I will still 



556 BIOGRAPHY OF 

excel you in condemning, in myself, anything that has been less 
than the straight line of sweetness, and of meekness, and of gen- 
tleness. I do condemn myself often that I am rash, that in an 
over-heat I said things I ought not to have said, and I am the 
more concerned, when I learn that these words are not merely a 
rhetorical fault, nor regarded simply as a blur upon me, but that 
they go like poisoned arrows and afflict other hearts ; and if there 
is any word that I have said, that has hurt the pastors of near 
churches, or churches afar off, I would to God that I could so 
utterly recall it, that they should never think of it again ; and I 
would be the first of all to humble myself before them, and crave 
that pardon of them, which I have asked before of God. And if 
that which I have said or done is a hindrance to a full reconcilia- 
tion, I would to God that all the waters of the Jordan might wash 
it out from every memory. I disown it and take it all back, and 
beseech of you, as I beseech of every other one, to remember of 
me, only those things that are like the Lord Jesus Christ, and that 
by His grace I have been enabled to do rightly. I am discharged 
of all jealousy. I have no pride that hinders me from saying 
these things to you, and giving you leave to give to them the ut- 
most latitude in their application. 

" Allusion has been made to sadness on my part, of which no 
man may know. For whatever may be the range of a man's out- 
ward life, there is a world within, unknown to any but God, and 
the most vital part of every man's life, is that which is within the 
crystal cave of his own silence and secrecy ; and of that I do not 
propose to speak any further than this — that I have often felt 
that my life had come very near to its end. I live in the shadow 
of that feeling every day. At some hour or other of every day, 
it seems to me as though but a hand's breadth was between me 
and the New Jerusalem. It is not either, necessarily a desire for 
dying nor an expectation of dying ; it is a sentiment. And I live 
very much in that habit ; not altogether a painful one — often far 
from it. But this I have felt in looking back in those moments 
upon my past life — I have felt a great joy that no man can take 
it from me. I lived when the reformation of intemperance first 
began, and I gave great time and strength to recover my coun- 
trymen from the vice. I began early my career, when there were 
few to plead for the liberty of the slave. I have lived in a mi- 
nority all my days, contesting for the right and for liberty. I 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 557 

had the privilege of living through that glorious revolutionary 
epoch of our time, when the political economy, and the politics, 
and the constitutional elements of our land were regenerated. 
Few men have ever had such a chance, or the health, or the op- 
portunity to put in labor, in a field so rich in future results. No 
man can take it from me that I have loved my country and that 
I have labored for her. No man can take it from me that I have 
loved the Church of Jesus Christ and that I have labored for it. 
No man can take it from me that I have loved my kind without 
caste or distinction. No man can take it from me ! Now, I do 
not care for my reputation after I am dead and gone. That kind 
of love of reputation I never had, but there is something that is 
to me as sweet as the bells of heaven. If I have been able to in- 
ject into the literature of my time a truly sweet and Christian 
spirit ; if I have been able to clothe nature so that children and 
women and grown people will have associations with trees and 
clouds, with the ground, with all the processes of annual resusci- 
tation ; if I have been able to clothe t-hem with religious associa- 
tions, so that the heavens declare again the glory of God and the 
earth His handiwork ; if I have put into words that which will 
cheer the sick and the poor, that will inspire the young, and that 
will go on working after I am dead — this has been a very sustain- 
ing and a very comforting thought to me. There is my joy for 
posterity — that when by and by the clouds are all. gone, when 
by and by the truth is as much known as the earth will ever 
know truth, that which I have done will stand, that which I am 
God will know, and cause it to stand for ever and ever." 

We give some extracts from his diary, and from letters written 
near this time, which show how he looked upon the past few 
years : 

" I have never read or heard of an instance where a pastor was 
called to carry forward a great church under such a pressure as I 
have. Whatever is deepest, tenderest, and best in manhood has 
been crucified with a prolonged crucifixion. I have seen the poi- 
sonous malaria, affecting my reputation in the whole community 
where I have dwelt for so many years with an unblemished char- 
acter. I have seen false brethren silently bringing to bear upon 
me the odium of the most damaging suspicions. I have seen them 
secretly taking counsel together, tampering with the fidelity of the 
members of Plymouth Church, and seducing my personal friends, 



558 BIOGRAPHY OF 

violating, under false pretences, ecclesiastical good neighborhood, 
calling councils to interfere with the peace and harmony of Ply- 
mouth Church, and thus spreading a local scandal and a ruinous 
suspicion over, literally, the wide world. From this persecution 
among false brethren the trouble broke out into public and pro- 
longed trial by the newspapers of the country. 

" With a few honorable exceptions, the religious press was 
quick to believe evil and to confirm suspicion, and, with a few 
equally honorable exceptions, the secular press joined my adver- 
saries. 

" I was next tried by my own church, and after a minute re- 
search, and upon grounds never controverted or undermined, I 
was acquitted and justified. For six months thereafter I was sub- 
jected to the disgrace of sitting before a court of justice and having 
every atom of evidence admitted that money and malice could 
bring together. And after this long and weary trial the jury re- 
fused to grant to my enemy the verdict which he sought; where- 
upon my ministerial neighbors, reversing the fact that the jury 
refused him damages, reported that I was not cleared — as if I had 
gone into court voluntarily, sought a verdict, and lost my suit. 

"Following the civil trial, these insidious enemies commenced 
a course of vexatious attempts to call councils, and so to weary 
the patience of the Plymouth people. 

" To meet this vexatious proceeding the church called the 
largest council ever convened upon this continent. Its members 
came almost to a man, with doubting hearts, but went away with 
enthusiastic joy, having justified the church and justified its pastor. 
But, perceiving the venomous spirit that disguised itself under 
pretence of anxiety for ecclesiastical regularity, the Great Coun- 
cil provided a court to sit and act when the council should be 
dissolved — a court composed of legal men, than whom none 
more impartial, just, and pure were ever called to sit upon the 
bench. No one dared to bring charges, though the court waited 
for years. 

" In this long and dreadful season it would be difficult to say 
which suffered most intensely, the church or its pastor. 

" No one will ever know the nervous strain required to bear 
this terrible pressure, to maintain a Christian spirit, to carry on 
my pulpit duties, and to encourage and sustain the spirit of the 
church." 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 559 

NOVEMBER, 1875. 

"Nov. 12, Friday morning. — For several years I have been 
passing through severe trials on account of the troubles in the 
Tilton family. This has taken hold upon the church, personal 
friends, family, newspapers, civil courts, ecclesiastical bodies, etc. 
I have thus been like a lamb, not before her shearers, but before 
a fire, every stick of which has had enough heat in it to con- 
sume one's peace and comfort. In all this six years I have laid 
down for myself the strictest adherence to Christian principles, 
in all my feelings toward each person or party concerned, and 
upon my conduct in every part of the perplexing and exhausting 
struggle for life — for my life is aimed at, and the struggle is for 
life, in every sense in which life is a blessing." 

" Tuesday, Nov. 23, 1875. — H called from Missionary 

Association to inquire what I thought of their asking Dr. 
Storrs to speak at opening of Fisk University at Nashville. 
Replied, No reason against, unless they thought that just at this 
time, when he heads and inspires a movement against Plymouth 
Church and me. But that they, and not I, should determine. 

" In myself there are two thoughts : (1) Should I give help to 
an enemy who will use it for my harm ? and (2), and a better one, 
Ought I to take any care or notice of the ascent or descent in 
influence of one not friendly ? Is it not better to go on doing 
duty and leave wholly to the Over-ruler the disposition of 
affairs ? 

" ' Fret not thyself because of evil- doers' " 

Shortly after the council had adjourned, and on the 27th of 
February, 1876, Dr. Leonard Bacon, in that spirit of brotherly 
love that filled the council at its close, wrote to Mr. Beecher : 

". . . 'A brother offended,' whether Storrs (R. S.) or Bud- 
ington, * is harder to be won than a strong city.' But is it not 
possible for you (God helping you) to win Brother Storrs, and 
then to win Budington also ? 

" Of course you are an innocent man, grievously calumniated, 
pierced through and through with arrows, like St. Sebastian. 
You feel that the position of those two brethren in relation to 
you is unbrotherly and unkind. You complain (and, I will say, 
reasonably) that neither of them came to you in the beginning 
of these troubles, or has come to you at any later time, with a 



560 BIOGRAPHY OF 

request for explanation or with offers of sympathy and assist- 
ance. They, on the other hand, think that you have withheld 
your confidence and have stood aloof from them. ... Is it not 
possible for you to win Storrs ? . . . You will not win him by 
waiting till he shall come to you. . . . What, then, would be 
the effect on Brooklyn, on our country, on ' English-speaking 
Christianity/ if it should be announced that you three are 
' brothers reconciled ' ? Have I proposed an impracticable thing ? 
Am I imagining an impossible result ? If so, alas ! . . ." 
To this Mr. Beecher replied : 

" Brooklyn, March 1, 1876. 
" My dear Doctor Bacon : 

" I heartily thank you for your letter and its kind and Chris- 
tian suggestions. They are such as a father might give to a son, 
and I am emboldened to hope that for my father's sake you will 
allow me to hold, in some degree, such a relation to you. 

" There is nothing in my heart to prevent a reconciliation with 
my offended brethren. 

" If it required only that I should express my regret for unan- 
swered letters, and my sorrow for harsh words forced from me in 
the height of distress, the whole matter might be settled in an hour. 
But it has largely ceased to be a personal affair, and has assumed 
the complex character of twt) parties with strong party feeling. 

" So that Dr. Storrs, for instance, is not at liberty to act from 
personal considerations alone. 

" Pass by his long and repeated interviews with Mr. Tilton as 
late as last New Year's, and take the most recent case, that of 
Mrs. Moulton. 

" Mrs. M. and I are in such opposition as admits of no 
middle ground. To take her up is to take sides against me. Our 
testimony in court is in deadly opposition. 

" But Dr. Storrs has assumed her cause to the extent, that, 
(aside from all counsel during her negotiations with Plymouth 
Church) he sends her to Mr. Bell (who has just taken charge of 
the Mission Sabbath-school of his church), with a letter request- 
ing him to give her a class. Such an act, at such a time, produced 
profound impressions, even more within his own church than 
out of it. After two Sundays' attendance Mrs. Moulton retired 
from the school under plea of ill health, a great excitement hav- 
ing arisen within the school. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 56 1 



" Dr. Storrs is surrounded by such men as 
and , whose animosity reaches bitterness. 



" I have very little hope, therefore, of favorable results. 

" You should be aware that from time to time during the two 
two years past, I have conveyed to these brethren my desire of 
reconciliation. 

" After the civil suit of last summer I drew up a letter to Dr. 
Storrs at the request of several members of his church (warm 
friends of mine), in which I expressed everything which one Chris- 
tian gentleman could to another. But my advisers said that such a 
letter should not be sent until it was distinctly ascertained that 
Dr. S. would take it kindly ; for, if disposed to do so, it might 
lay the foundations for a refusal with reasons, which would leave 
the case far worse than it was before. As the summer vacation 
was at hand, the matter was dropped. 

" I fear that Dr. Storrs is so fully committed that it is too 
late. He could not have made a declaration of war more effect- 
ually than by taking up Mrs. Moulton, considering her deadly 
antagonism to me and her peculiar relations to Plymouth 
Church. 

"But if the Lord will open a way, you may be sure that I 
shall not hold back nor hesitate. I do not regard my own per- 
sonal feelings or interests as comparable to the welfare of these 
neighboring churches, and the cause of religion in all churches. 
I would go to the very verge of truth and honor in my expressions 
of regret and retraction. Yet, with all this, I fear, alas ! there is 
no hope. 

" But I leave all to God. The effect of a reconciliation 
would be pentecostal. 

" I am the man going to Jericho, stripped, wounded, and left 
for dead. Nevertheless I am writing to apologize both to the 
priest and Levite, for not considering the proprieties and respect 
due them as they passed by. 

" Gratefully yours, 

" Henry Ward Beecher." 

" P.S. I have thought long and anxiously upon this matter. 
I have sent friends to Dr. Storrs, who could get no word of en- 
couragement. He eschews even my personal friends who were 
his warm friends. 



562 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" I have thought that any movement with hope of success 
must come from within his own church. But there is an un- 
developed party on each side. 

" On the whole, I have come to about this : 

" That the families of the two churches should hold on to 
each other more firmly than ever before, and on both sides refuse 
to be separated. 

" Then, as time goes on and the scandal gives place to other 
things in the public mind, occasions or influences which we do 
not now command may arise in God's good providence, and a 
way be opened. 

" I have often and often thought that if it were God's will 
that I might die, a great stumbling-block would be taken away, 
and health would come out of my grave to the ailing hearts 
about me. 

" And why not ? 

" I have lived long, and no one ever had leave to live in an 
age of such opportunities, as those who have had their prime in 
the past thirty years. One ought not to be greedy of years." 

The hope in which the Great Council was called was realized. 
The pastors and delegates, called from twenty-one States, return- 
ing to their homes, became centres of a noble, generous influence, 
correcting false impressions, setting doubts at rest, renewing 
again the old love and confidence. 

It is true that here and there, especially in certain theological 
centres, there were those whose partisan zeal, jealous malice, or 
even personal hatred would not let them rest content with the 
deliverance ; who would rather have kept Christendom deluged 
with the vile mess than that Mr. Beecher should stand cleared 
and justified. 

But the great serpent was dead ; only its tail wiggled and 
stirred a little dust for a short time. After a little even that lay 
quiet. 

The clouds were dissipating, the sky was clearing, and soon 
the sun shone with its former brightness, giving comfort, light, 
and life to many thousands. 

The conspiracy had failed. Where to-day are the conspira- 
tors ? * 

* A friend has aptly put the story in a few short lines : 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. §£> 

THE FALSE SECRET. 

'* 'Twas the thistle that told the yellow-bird, 

And the yellow-bird told the bee, 
And the gossip winds that overheard 

Went telling the willow-tree ; 
And that is the way the little tree-frog 

Is supposed to know it all ; 
He told his cousins that lived in a bog, 

And they croaked to the rushes tall ; 
They whispered the reptiles that live in the mud, 

And wiggle and creep and crawl, 
To tell the mosquitoes that feast on blood 

That a star was seen to fall. 

" But the lilies knew that it could not be true, 

The lilies that looked on high ; 
And the waters blue, where the lilies grew. 

Not so the little firefly : 
He met his friends where the garden ends 

And the low marsh meadows lie ; 
They said it was sad as sad could be 

That a star must fall and die, 
And the goblin meteors danced with glee — 

But the star is still in the sky" 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

Rest and renewed Activity — Lecturing Tours — Resignation from the Con- 
gregational Association — Boston Criticisms. 

VERY shortly after Mr. Beecher settled in Brooklyn he began 
working in a somewhat different and larger parish than 
the one included in his church. At first in the more im- 
mediate vicinity of New York, then gradually widening and en- 
larging his circuit, he spent no small portion of the week, during 
the winter months, in lecturing. He sought to elevate the public 
morals, to educate public sentiment along the line of integrity 
and morality. While his lectures were full of the humorous, 
alive with bright poetic thoughts, there was always a purpose 
sought in each and this always seemed essential to the develop- 
ment of his best efforts. No lecture was ever delivered by him 
that some of his audience did not go home strengthened and en- 
couraged in their purposes of right living, or awakened to begin a 
better life. They were week-day sermons on practical morals. 
His field had gradually broadened, until by 1870 it included all 
of the Northern States east of the Mississippi River. From these 
lectures he derived no inconsiderable income, which was expend- 
ed with no mean hand for charity, on friends, and the gratifica- 
tion of his artistic and literary tastes. 

With the outbreak of the Tilton conspiracy, and the various 
vexatious proceedings incidental to and in aid thereof, he natu- 
rally found too much employment at home, and too great a strain 
on mind and body, to leave either strength, leisure, or inclination 
for lecturing. With the close of the Great Council came com- 
parative peace, and in the winter following he resumed his regu- 
lar lecturing. For this there were several reasons. 

The mental and nervous wear and tear of the past five or six 
years had been terrible. As we have seen, he had many times 
been brought to the verge of complete prostration, which he 
feared might end in death or paralysis. 

It was imperative that he should get some relief from this 

564 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 565 

strain. With him rest did not mean idleness, but rather activity 
in a different direction, often greater than the work which had 
fatigued him. Such a remedy he found in lecturing. 

Then it was necessary to make good the great expenditure of 
money entailed upon him. The " trial year " alone had cost him 
over $118,000, and, notwithstanding the loving generosity of his 
people had raised his salary for that year to $100,000, he found 
himself heavily in debt. Lecturing afforded the means of reme- 
dying this difficulty. 

Another reason strenuously urged by friends, was that, to meet 
and talk with the many thousands scattered over the land, who 
had so long loved and trusted him, would greatly aid in scatter- 
ing the clouds that had been so long lowering ; that it would be 
a source of strength and comfort to them, and greatly benefit 
him. A series of lecture-tours followed during the next two or 
three years, extending through the New England States, West, 
Southwest, and South, the results of which fully justified every 
reason for this undertaking. 

Then for the first time he realized how many friends he had. 
It is true that when the sky was darkest he received many hun- 
dreds of letters from friends and strangers expressing unabated 
confidence and sympathy. Grateful and comforting as these 
were to him, they did not so fully reveal to him the hold that he 
had on the hearts of the American people as the demonstrations 
that greeted him on these lecture-trips. 

What these demonstrations were we can gain some idea from 
his letters home, brief and hasty sketches, written at odd inter- 
vals : 

" Next Boston. Temple full. Received me with prolonged 
clapping. . . . Preached Sunday a.m. for . Had great lib- 
erty, and, as he says, swept everything. ... At night in Boston 

for . Ten thousand people couldn't get in. Shook hand 0, 

with whole audiences. Papers next morning with kind notices. 
Went to Congregational ministers' meeting on Monday morning. 
Cheered and clapped when I entered. After paper for day was 
finished it was moved that I address the meeting. I did so, and 
closed with prayer. All wept, and it broke up like a revival 
meeting. D , S , A ,* etc., present ; did not shake 

* Leaders among the opposition clerg)\ 



566 BIOGRAPHY OF 

hands, but scores of others did. ... I learn that the Andover 
students have come back three to one against S . They in- 
tend asking me over to-morrow morning to talk to them. . . ." 

"I preached yesterday in St. Paul (Minn.) I returned early 
this morning to meet the clergy of this city in Stimpson's study, 
about twenty-five, of all churches, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Con- 
gregational, Baptist, Lutheran, Free-Will Baptist, etc. Two hours, 
in which they questioned me about my views on doctrines, sermon- 
making, preaching, etc., etc., and at close I prayed with them. 
Royal time. They were mere than cordial. Excitement for to- 
night's lecture even greater than for that of Friday. Dr. Post, of 
St. Louis, writes to me to fill his pulpit, also the other Congrega- 
tional minister ; while the very papers that used, a year or two ago, 
to abuse me, are demanding that the largest hall or theatre shall 
be taken, so that the common people can get in." 

" The sense of spring has accompanied me all the way. I am 
now in the middle of my third week — nearly half through. Laus 
Deo. Everywhere the same kindness, affection, and enthusiasm. 
Madison is the capital of this State, and the Speaker and members 
of the Legislature have just sent a committee requesting me to 
open the house with prayer. ... In short, the whole slander is 
burned over out here, like a prairie or an old corn-field, and will 
never lift itself again." 

" I had not expected a large audience, but I had it. I ex- 
pected but few of the upper class of people, but I had the best of 
the city ; even Watterson, of the Courier- Journal, that had always 
vilely blackguarded me, sent for tickets for himself, family, and 
his father. I was in good trim, and for nearly two hours I 
avenged myself upon that audience. The enthusiasm was com- 
plete. Every one said that I had conquered Louisville, and so I 
am enjoying the fruits of revenge! I had an uncommonly suc- 
cessful trip. In Pittsburgh there was a grand audience — all the 
ministers from far and near. It was said that there were a hun- 
dred in the audience." 

"All my life long I have had good, warm friends, but I never 
knew until recently what friendship was outside of those of my 
own immediate circle. The unmistakable enthusiasm, the love 
and eagerness, the lingering and the longing, have been such as 
to fill my cup full. 

" I have felt, time and again, that that wire 1 ! I have had of 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 567 

trouble I have bought at a cheap rate ; the trouble has been but 
a small price to pay for a lodgment in the hearts of the best men, 
the best women, and the children. I have found that those whose 
love is deepest and warmest represent families who look at every- 
thing in the world from the standpoint of the household — who 
judge of preaching, of ethics, and of methods by the relation 
which they bear to the bringing up of the young, and to the 
founding and maintaining of Christian homes. That part of the 
community who live in the household, and honor it, I had almost 
said, were universally my most dear and cordial friends." 

From this time on until his death he was more or less in the 
lecture-field every year. 

Another period of restful calm sets in, during which he de- 
voted himself, comparatively undisturbed, to his duties in the 
pulpit, the editorial chair of the Christian Union, and the lecture- 
field. 

During this period of quiet he made those definite announce- 
ments of his beliefs that so much disturbed many of his theolo- 
gical brethren, notably his sermon on the " Background of Mys- 
tery," in which he discussed that mysterious question of future 
punishment ; and a little later the series since published under 
the title of " Evolution and Religion," discussing the application 
of the theory of evolution to religious beliefs.* Notwith- 
standing many of the most eminent of the American and 
English clergy had both entertained and expressed similar 
views, their exposition by Mr. Beecher, as usual, called forth 
much criticism, more or less severe according to the theological 
bent of the critic, but also much friendly comment. 

He was at this time a member of "The Congregational Asso- 
ciation," composed of Congregational clergymen of New York 
and Brooklyn. Feeling that many of his brethren did not agree 
with his views, and that yet they might be held to some extent 
responsible for his beliefs, he determined to resign from the As- 
sociation. 

At the meeting October 13, 1882, he had been assigned for 
discussion the topic of " Spiritual Barbarism." After discuss- 
ing the theological beliefs which he regarded as appropriately 

* We present Mr. Beecher's theological beliefs more fully in another 
chapter. 



568 BIOGRAPHY OF 

coming under that expression, he went on to give a full declara- 
tion of his personal beliefs, and then at the close stated : 

" I have reason to believe that a great many of the brethren 
of the Congregational faith would speak more than disapproval, 
and that many even in the Association to which I belong feel as 
though they could not bear the burden of responsibility of being 
supposed to tolerate the views I have held and taught ; and it is 
on this account that I, as a man of honor and a Christian gentle- 
man, cannot afford to lay on anybody the responsibility of my 
views. I cannot afford especially to put them in such a position 
that they are obliged to defend me. I cannot make them re- 
sponsible in any way, and therefore I now here, and in the great- 
est love and sympathy, lay down my membership of this Associa- 
tion and go forth — not to be separated from you. I shall be 
nearer to you than if I should be in ecclesiastical relation. I 
will work for you, I will lecture for you, I will personally do 
everything I can for you. I will even attend these meetings as a 
spectator with you. I will devote my whole life to the Congre- 
gational churches and their interests, as well as to all other 
churches of Christ Jesus. I am not going out into the cold. I 
am not going out into another sect. I am not going away from 
you in any spirit of disgust. I never was in warmer personal 
sympathy with every one of you than I am now ; but I lay down 
the responsibility that you have borne for me — I take it off from 
you and put it on myself. And now you can say, ' He is a mem- 
ber of the Congregational Church, but he has relieved his breth- 
ren of all responsibility whatever for his teachings.' That you 
are perfectly free to do. With thanks for your great kindness, 
and with thanks to God for the life which we have had here to- 
gether, I am now no longer a member of the Congregational 
Association of New York and Brooklyn, but with you a member 
of the body of Christ Jesus, in full fellowship with you in the 
matter of faith and love and hope." 

He was earnestly urged to reconsider his resignation. He 
felt it to be his duty to adhere to the determination expressed. 
The Association unanimously passed the following resolution 
expressive of their feelings : 

" Resolved, That the members of the New York and Brook- 
lyn Association receive the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher's resigna- 
tion of his membership in this body with very deep pain and re- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 569 

gret. We cannot fail to recognize the generous magnanimity 
which has led him to volunteer this action, lest he should seem 
even indirectly to make his brethren responsible before the pub- 
lic for the support of philosophical and theological doctrines 
wherein he is popularly supposed to differ essentially with those 
who hold the established and current evangelical faith. His full 
and proffered exposition of doctrinal views that he has made at 
this meeting indicates the propriety of his continued membership 
in this or any other Congregational Association. We hereby de- 
clare our desire that he may see his way clear to reconsider and 
withdraw it. We desire to place on record as the result of a long 
and intimate acquaintance with Mr. Beecher, and a familiar ob- 
servation of the results of his life, as well as his preaching and 
pastoral work, that we cherish for him an ever-growing personal 
attachment as a brother beloved, and a deepening sense of his 
worth as a Christian minister. We cannot now contemplate the 
possibility of his future absence from our meetings without a 
depressing sense of the loss we are to suffer, and unitedly pledge 
the hearts of the Association to him, and express the hope that 
the day for his return may soon come." 

Of course much comment followed this step — perhaps more 
marked among some of the Boston clergy than elsewhere — and 
in its turn drew from Mr. Beecher several characteristic letters. 
One to a near friend : 

" Don't be scared because Boston has boiled over ; it has not 
put the fire out. 

" It is amusing to see the pains taken to prove that I am of 
no account, dead, useless, a castaway. I know that I am dead. 
I knew it twenty years ago ; I have been certified of the fact 
every year since. I have no influence — I never had, cannot have; 
a hundred fluttering ministers are eager to say so before the 
world ! Well, what of it ? The wild-fowl return from the north 
as usual, winter comes on, the spring will come in its season, 
birds and flowers — indeed, it does seem to me that Nature cares 
nothing at ail for all this squabbling of men ! I am astonished 
at Nature !"...." 

Another in reply to an invitation to answer his critics through 
the columns of the Boston Traveller : 

" I thank you for the letter and paper. I have read the 
* somewhat large expressions of these many and excellent men in 



5 70 RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECHER. 

regard to my orthodoxy, consistency, influence, and general 
merit, without wishing for a moment to reply, as you kindly re- 
quest me. 

" When a dead man is lying on the dissecting-table under the 
hands of experts, it would be unbecoming in him to rise up sud- 
denly and discuss with his surgeons the propriety of their meth- 
ods and the truth of results. It is not often that one can see 
himself as others see him, and especially as Boston sees him, and, 
more than all, as Boston clergymen see him. I am reduced to 
pulp, but, thank Heaven! not to ashes. When you suggest a reply 
to these, I am sure you can have no conception of the subdued 
and enlightened state of my mind. I am bent on improvement. 
Laying aside all my old notions of my beliefs and of my standing, 
I am carefully putting together the real man that I now am taught 
that I am. When I get my new personal identity together and 
in working shape, I intend to study theology "somewhere, though 
in my present confusion I cannot yet say whether I shall study at 
Andover or Boston ; New Haven is nearer, but Dr. Smythe has 
been settled there, and I fear laxity of doctrine in his neighbor- 
hood. Princeton is not far to the south of me, but Dr. McCosh 
is a Christian evolutionist, and it would be folly, after what I 
have suffered, to come under the malarial influence of that philo- 
sophy. On the whole, I incline to study at Park Street. But 
wherever I may go I am determined before I die to find a theolo- 
gy which will pass muster at Bangor, at Andover, at Cambridge, 
at New Haven, at Princeton, at Alleghany, at Oberlin, at Chica- 
go, and at Park Street. 

" Then I shall willingly die." 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

i 

i Attacking Corrupt Judges — Interest in Political Questions— Advocating 

Arthur's Renomination — Opposing Blaine — Supporting Cleveland — 

Campaign of 1884 — After the Battle. 

IT had always been Mr. Beecher's belief that a Christian gen- 
tleman should be a good citizen, and that being a good citi- 
zen involved some responsibility in securing and enforcing 
righteous laws, in electing honest men, and defeating the corrupt 
and unworthy. With this belief his whole life was consistent. 
In his early ministry we find him fighting corruption, intoxication, 
and slavery, the then three great public evils. Later he stood as 
one of the sponsors to the Republican party. In 1856 he entered 
with all his force in the Fremont campaign, and in i860 stumped 
the Middle and New England States for Lincoln. The over- 
throw of slavery was his objective point — the one great public 
evil which at that time overtopped all others. 

When, in 1864, Lincoln ran for re-election, he spared no effort 
to secure it. 

And as he thought that whatever pertained to the duties of a 
Christian man might properly be discussed in the pulpit, he did 
not hesitate, during those war times, when the national existence 
was threatened, to advocate the cause of the nation and the 
cause of liberty from his pulpit ; at one time, just before the 
election of 1864, devoting his evening sermon for the six pre- 
ceding weeks exclusively to the nation's cause. 

We remember vividly the great throngs that packed the 
church for two hours before the sermon, many getting entrance 
through the side windows, while the street contained as many 
more trying in vain to even reach the open doors. 

We shall never forget the thrills of excitement that ran 
through the audience under the influence of Mr. Beecher's im- 
passioned eloquence. He was thoroughly aroused, and seemed 
to impart much of the intensity of his own feelings to his audi- 
ence. He felt that to defeat Lincoln then meant to throw away 

571 



572 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

all that had been obtained by such a sacrifice of men and 
money. 

We are not surprised, then, in 1868-69 — at tne time when 
the flood of corruption had deluged New York city, reaching 
even to the judges on the bench — that his voice was raised in 
continuous protest against that disgraceful state of affairs, call- 
ing on all good men to unite and purge the city of its corruption. 
The attack from Plymouth pulpit upon the corrupt judiciary, 
especially, was unsparing and continuous, sometimes through 
whole sermons and sometimes incidentally. 

The times were in desperate need of some bold moral surgery, 
for it would be hard to imagine a worse condition in the public 
administration — in well nigh every department and branch — than 
that which existed from 1867 to 1871. The infamous Tweed had 
assumed virtually the dictatorship, and impudently wanted to 
know of the people, "What are you going to do about it?" A 
query which was fully answered a few years later. But the climax 
was reached in the almost utter corruption of the bench. There 
were some honest judges in New York then, but they suffered 
from the same imputation that, in more modern times, falls upon 
any man who has had the misfortune to have been elected an 
alderman of the same city. Friends of some of the judges were 
rash enough to attempt an answer through the public press to 
Mr. Beecher's attack. But this only furnished the text for a 
series of more terrible denunciations in reply, which led to a 
very hasty muzzling of the rash defenders of the bench. A pub- 
lic discussion, even in those days of public apathy and demor- 
alization, was the last thing that was wished by the corruptionists 
whom he was attacking. 

To a member of the federal bench who wrote him, protesting 
that there were some honest judges who would be injured by Mr. 
Beecher's strictures, he replied : 

"... Of the fourteen (elective) judges of New York there 
are not over five who are not known to be corrupt — i. e., who do 
not employ their office for the promotion of their private interests 
at the expense of the public good — and hardly one of the whole 
fourteen who is not guilty of flagrant nepotism. 

" Now, if clergymen were violating the vows of their calling 
in half that proportion they would have no right to complain, if 
some judge declared 'the clergy were corrupt,' and the judges 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 573 

have no just reason of complaint, when a clergymen declares the 
courts of New York to be corrupt, and that their judges * stink' 
(asking pardon of your sensibility). 

" If this allegation in so broad a form involves the innocent 
along with the guilty, it is because such is the law of social lia- 
bility. . . . 

"If the honorable men who are alive to the purity of the ju- 
dicial reputation can find no way of making a public and recog- 
nized distinction between themselves and their unworthy com- 
panions, they should not be surprised if their own names are 
clouded, too. 

" In regard to yourself, personally, I have never heard a whis- 
per of dishonor, . . . and if you do not receive the full meed of 
your desert, is it not because you belong to a profession which, 
in New York City, is earning itself an odious reputation ? 

" I wish to arouse a conscience in the community, outside of 
courts, which will compel those judges who are pure, and who 
value their reputation, to manifest their repugnance at corrup- 
tion. I do not mean to pause. . . . 

" I am obliged to you for the frankness of your letter, and 
none the less because I entirely disagree with your judgment. 

"You fear that such indiscriminate censure will ruin the in- 
fluence of law and courts, and demoralize society. 

" Bad laws and bad judges demoralize society, and not the ex- 
posure of them. Religion was in no danger when our Master de- 
nounced the priesthood of the temple, among whom, as with 
judges, there were many devout and pure men. He expressed, 
as I do, the opinion of society outside of the profession. The 
exposure was a step toward reformation." 

How far his persistent denunciation stimulated and awakened 
the public conscience and hastened the final overthrow of that 
colossal reign of corruption, of course no man can say. But the 
attention and excitement aroused thereby indicated that his part 
in that strife was no insignificant one. 

In his own city he took an active part in the local elections, 
working earnestly for the public welfare, striving to secure the 
election of those men who would best administer the local 
government. 

In the earlier years of the Republican party questions vitally 
affecting the welfare of the nation, and even its very existence, 



574 BIOGRAPHY OF 

were before the people. And on these the Republican party- 
maintained those principles, which he believed were essential to 
the maintenance of the nation. He threw his entire strength 
and influence with that party, sparing nothing. After the war 
had determined the questions of secession and slavery, and the 
reconstruction period had past and a sound financial policy been 
established, he noticed with no little disturbance the insidious 
growth of corrupting influences in various branches of the gov- 
ernment, and the gradually increasing prominence and influence 
in the party's councils of men who did not, in his opinion, stand 
for the highest principles of personal and political honesty. So 
far as he could he sought to counteract this tendency downward. 
He earnestly supported the better men in the party, and tried to 
prevent the dangerous ones from obtaining power. 

So long as the high national principles for which the party- 
stood were in the least in danger, and were acquiring a settled 
permanence, he viewed these disquieting signs as morbid 
growths upon a body healthy in the main, and which the general 
strength of the body could throw off, like boils or skin eruptions 
on a strong man — painful and unsightly, but not dangerous to 
life nor difficult to cure. 

But as the government became more and more settled, and as 
the questions which called the Republican party into existence 
and which followed in the reconstructive period became more 
and more fixed facts, he noticed with increasing disquietude that 
the struggles at the national election were becoming more a con- 
test for party supremacy than for national security, where per- 
sonal benefit was rapidly outstripping the country's welfare. At 
each election the politicians on either side found an increasingly 
greater difficulty in framing a platform that should differ in any 
important particular from its opponent's, save on the tariff ques- 
tion, regarding which Mr. Beecher was not in accord with his 
party. The party platforms were rapidly becoming noticeable 
only for the ingenuity with which the same ideas were expressed 
in high-sounding phrases, differing only in words. 

Even as far back as 1877, in a sermon published under the 
title of " Past Perils and Perils of To-day," he gave an intima- 
tion of his growing feeling, almost prophetic : 

" The perils of the hour are the last that I shall mention, and 
they are the least. Whatever may betide the questions that are 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 575 

now at issue, they will result in nothing worse than simple tran- 
sient mischief, moral, political, and civil. The foundations are 
settled. The future policy of this nation, whichever hands un- 
dertake to hold the helm, is assured. I would rather that the 
nation, which has been rescued by the great Republican party, 
and borne through all the shoals and whirls and troubles of the 
reconstructive period, for which they are now receiving more 
curses than kindnesses, and whose mistakes are multiplied before 
the eyes of men, while their wisdom is little thought of — I would 
rather that this nation should remain in their hands, if they are 
worthy to hold the helm ; but if not, give me a hand that can 
hold the helm, whosesoever it is. If their light is extinguished 
along the coast, and they have no longer power to guide the 
ship of state to a safe harbor, let other lights be kindled. We 
cannot afford to wait for any party. The nation is more impor- 
tant than any party. It is not, then, any particular peril of a 
change of administration that is to be feared. I look upon that 
with interest, but still with equanimity." 

He noticed with jealous interest the men who were growing 
up and pushing to the front in the Republican party, studying 
their characters, watching their actions, noting their words to see 
toward what they were tending, whether good or evil, whether 
they would be safe leaders and wise administrators. So that 
when the notable campaign of 1884 began, and the conventions 
were called to select the candidates for the Presidency, he had 
very clearly defined opinions as to the fitness of the various as- 
pirants in both parties, the result of long and careful observation. 

Of course his first concern was as to the action of the Repub- 
lican party. He earnestly hoped that the party would have the 
wisdom to renominate President Arthur. 

When General Arthur was called to the Presidential chair by 
the sad death of General Garfield, Mr. Beecher, in common with 
many others, had grave misgivings as to his wisdom and ability 
to administer so important an office. But he developed such 
unexpected administrative ability, showed so much wisdom and 
such rare fortitude in resisting his party's leaders, in any unwise 
or hurtful action, and so much discrimination in the exercise 
of his veto power, that he won the admiration and esteem of 
those who had, with doubt and solicitude, seen him enter upon 
his untried duties. 



576 BIOGRAPHY OP 

Every instinct of good sense, every argument of wisdom, 
urged his renomination ; the precedents of the party gave him a 
second term. 

With this feeling Mr. Beecher was fully in accord. So when 
a meeting of merchants and business men was called at the 
Cooper Institute, early in the summer of 1884, to give expression 
to this sentiment, Mr. Beecher very gladly accepted an invita- 
tion to address it. 

He had a double reason in advocating General Arthur's re- 
nomination, or rather two reasons, one positive and the other 
negative. 

He had acquired great confidence in General Arthur, and 
admiration for his past administration. He believed that he was 
by all odds the best man in his party for the place. 

He also felt sure that if General Arthur was not nominated, 
Mr. Blaine would be, and in Mr. Blaine he saw, as he believed, a 
very serious threatening danger. He was one of the men whose 
career he had carefully watched, and for whom he had a very 
pronounced distrust. Of him he said : 

" For twelve years I have watched him, anxious that he 
should be the right man — that he is not. For more than ten 
years I have been afraid of him." 

Behind Mr. Blaine, as his earnest advocates, he saw the men 
who had been most prominent in the jobbery and corruption 
that had, from time to time, broken out like plague-spots in dif- 
ferent parts of the country. 

He strongly felt that his election would be regarded by the 
world at large as an endorsement of the idea, painfully prevalent, 
that all a man should aim at in politics is success, no matter how. 

He deeply regretted the unwisdom of not renominating Gen- 
eral Arthur. 

When the National Convention put Mr. Blaine in nomination 
Mr. Beecher had three courses left open to him : either (1) sup- 
port Mr. Blaine, as his party's nominee regularly presented by 
the National Convention ; or (2) stay at home and not vote ; or 
(3) support the opposing candidate. 

To the first his answer was : 

" It is almost the one argument I hear on every hand : ' I 
don't like Blaine. He was not my choice, but then he is the 
regular nominee of our party.' 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 577 

"Why, according to your logic, you must vote for whomsoever 
the convention gives you. If the convention had given you 
Tweed, every mother's son of you would have dropped your 
tail between your legs and voted for Tweed. The logic of this 
is infamous. . . . You would not do it anywhere else, I tell you, 
except where the murrain of a blighted politics had fallen upon 
you." 

The second course had too much of prudential shirking to 
suit Mr. Beecher's temperament. If the Republican nominee was 
an unfit man to vote for, he was an unfit man to be elected; and, 
unless his opponent should be as conspicuously unfit, every vote 
should be so cast as to affect the greatest result. 

The third course alone seemed open, and when the Democratic 
Convention, in a sudden spasm of good sense and wisdom, 
nominated Governor Cleveland, Mr. Beecher's mind was speedily 
made up. 

With the first outbreak of that campaign of slanders Mr. 
Beecher was greatly disturbed. He at once requested some per- 
sonal friends residing in Buffalo, and well acquainted with Gov- 
ernor Cleveland's life and reputation, themselves Republicans, 
to make a thorough investigation of the scandalous stories in 
circulation, and was satisfied from their report that with the one 
exception, admitted, repented of, and lived down by a life of 
honesty and integrity, the stories were false. 

Once satisfied of their falsity, he entered into the campaign 
with all his old-time fire and zeal. 

His indignation was intensely roused at their circulation, and 
it only needed the timid caution of friends, that he would injure 
himself, by advocating the cause of a man about whom such stories 
were told, to arouse him to an outburst of indignant scorn. 

" In all the history of politics we do not believe that lies so 
cruel, so base, so atrocious have ever been set in motion. The 
air is murky with the shameless stories of Mr. Cleveland's 
private life. To our sorrow and shame we find these cockatrice's 
eggs brooded and hatched by rash and credulous clergymen. 
They could not go to Mr. Cleveland with honest inquiry, so they 
opened their ears to the harlot and the drunkard. They have 
sought by hint, innuendo, irresponsible slander, to poison the 
faith of holy men, of innocent women, and they have sought to 
make back-biting a copt virtue, and to change the sanctuary into 



578 BIOGRAPH Y OF 

a salacious whispering-gallery. Is it for our sins, or for a trial of 
our faith, that God has permitted the plagues of Egypt to revisit 
us ? The land swarms with vermin, frogs slime our bread- 
troughs, and lice crawl about our chambers. 

" Do timid ministers ever reflect that the guilt of a vice or a 
crime measures the guilt of him who charges them falsely ? 
Slander takes on the guilt of crime alleged. True religion does 
not creep through twilight passages, but is open, frank, rejoicing 
not in iniquity, but rejoicing in the truth, hoping all things. 
These vespertilian saints, whose soft bat's wings bear them from 
house to house, and from town to town, in the service of Baal, 
the God of flies and lies, will one day creep into the holes and 
clefts of rocks and hide themselves. . . . 

" When in the gloomy night of my own suffering I sounded 
every depth of sorrow, I vowed that if God would bring the day 
star of hope I would never suffer brother, friend, or neighbor to 
go unfriended should a like serpent seek to crush him. That 
oath I will regard now. Because I know the bitterness of veno- 
mous lies, I will stand against infamous lies that seek to sting to 
death an upright man and magistrate. Men counsel me to pru- 
dence lest I stir again my own griefs. No ! I will not be 
prudent. If I refuse to interpose a shield of well-placed con- 
fidence between Governor Cleveland and the swarm of liars that 
nuzzle in the mud, or sling arrows from ambush, may my tongue 
cleave to the roof of my mouth and my right hand forget its 
cunning ! I will imitate the noble example set me by Plymouth 
Church in the day of my calamity. They were not ashamed of 
my bonds. They stood by me with God-sent loyalty. It was a 
heroic deed. They have set my duty before me, and I will imi- 
tate their example." 

Of course many of Mr. Beecher's friends were greatly exer- 
cised, and lamented what they feared would be a suicidal course. 
Again, for the twentieth time or more, he was rushing upon self- 
destruction — his prestige would be destroyed, his influence lost, 
and untold woes would follow. 

As we look back, scarce three years, we cannot but smile, in 
the light of subsequent events, at the great excitement and grief 
that existed then. 

But then it was real. Every effort was made at first to win 
Mr. Beecher to support Mr. Blaine, and then that he should not 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 5/9 

support Governor Cleveland, and this was carried even to the 
extent of threats. 

The excitement threatened a serious division in his church, 
and the danger seemed more real than on any previous occasion. 
Party zeal ran high. 

But Mr. Beecher had acted only after careful deliberation ; 
being satisfied as to what his duty was, no argument could sway 
him in the least that appealed to his fears or personal benefit. 

To a clerical friend who wrote in early autumn, just before 
the real campaign began, he replied : 

"... But, now, hear me. If I thought it my duty to speak 
for Cleveland and against Blaine, I would do it, though I lost all 
my influence, all my friends, my church, and even my own 
family. All considerations urged upon me which touch my feel- 
ings, hopes, interests, are repelled by me with the whole force of 
my nature, and I cannot treat my friends better than I do my 
innermost self. I will not be bribed even by love. I have but a 
few years left. They shall not put to shame all my anti-slavery 
days. I do not doubt that you love me, but if you loved me 
yet more you would urge me to stand firmly to my conscientious 
convictions and not heed ' what men can do unto me.' The 
election of Blaine will be a sign of such demoralized moral sense 
as I never dreamed could befall Christian men and ministers ; or 
I should feel so, if I had not seen good men and ministers in the 
great anti-slavery struggle. . . . 

" I wish you would say to all my honest-hearted brethren, 
please let me alone ! I am as old as you are, as diligent in seeking 
the truth, and as conscientious in deciding and acting." 

To a letter of remonstrance and advice from a dear friend, a 
member of his church, he wrote : 

" I am sure that I receive with consideration any advice 
which grown-up men desire to lay before me, especially those cf 
my church. But, on the other hand, I hope the brethren will 
take into consideration that I am as much interested in being 
right as they can possibly be, and that I have had some ex- 
perience in public life, and that all that is said in the newspapers, 
and constituting the knowledge in which the brethren act, is also 
before me, and that I have a profound interest in the welfare of 
the nation and of the young men in it. 

" That, after forty years' hot experience of stormy times, I 



58O BIOGRAPHY OF 

have been led, hitherto by God's providence, to the right con- 
clusion. 

" I am still in God's hands, and daily ask His guiding provi- 
dence. What more ? 

" The alarm of friends, the party excitement of others, has no 
effect upon me whatever. Any new and real information I shall 
be grateful for, but to tell me nothing, and only to express 
amazement, wonder, concern, etc., and let me know how damag- 
ing to my reputation and interests it will be if I follow my judg- 
ment, and not theirs, who love me as I am sure these brethren do, 
indicates how far gone in political excitement they are, and how 
little they understand the man whom they love. 

" I shall do my duty as God reveals it to me, without a mo- 
ment's consideration of its effect on me. I am ready to resign 
my pastorate at an hour's notice, when I no longer have free- 
dom to follow my convictions, or when doing so divides the 
church and scatters the congregation. 

" I am thankful to the brethren who have written ; even more 
so to those who have not. 

" I receive ten to forty letters a day from all over the land, 
clean and unclean, and merely glance at them and burn them." 

To one who went to the extent of threats he replied : 

" Your remarkable note of August 8th is received. I have 
nothing to say to the general views, except that every man should 
determine his duty for himself and respect the same liberty in 
other people. 

" To your closing sentence, which contains the threat that, if I 
vote for Cleveland, you ' (I) shall feel compelled to withdraw 
from your Church and your teachings,' I would only say that, hav- 
ing profited so little by my teachings, as this arrogant sentence in- 
dicates, I should certainly advise you to change your church rela- 
tions in the hope of better results." 

It was not until the campaign had gotten under full headway, 
and within three or four weeks of the election, that Mr. Beecher 
began to take any very active part in it. At first he intended to 
speak only in New" York and Brooklyn ; but as the campaign pro- 
gressed he realized the importance of devoting every energy to 
securing the States of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. 
Accordingly, during the last two weeks he spoke every day save 
Sunday, and on some days twice, visiting the more important 



RE V. HENR Y WA RD BEECH ER. 5 8 1 

cities of those three States. He was very earnest that the " In- 
dependents " should not enter the Democratic party, but should 
organize as " Independent Republicans." 

He thought that it was time that the political managers should 
understand, that there was a moral sense in the community that 
would not submit to bad nominations ; that the best way to re- 
deem his party was by defeating unworthy nominees, and that, if 
this was persisted in, the politicians would soon see the necessity 
of deferring to an enlightened public sentiment, and putting in 
nomination only its best men. 

He felt that the Republican party was being misled, by the 
same influences that had secured unwise or improper nomina- 
tions, into a very dangerous path, that would ultimately lead to 
the utter destruction of the party itself. 

In one of his earlier speeches in the campaign of 1884, he 
voiced that feeling when he spoke of his appearing in opposition 
to the organized action of the party : 

" I confess, at the risk of the imputation of some immodesty, 
that my appearance here to-night, to antagonize the organized ac- 
tion of the Republican party, is itself a fact of the most signifi- 
cant character. Before many of you were born I was rocking 
the cradle of the Republican party. I fought its early battles 
when it was in an apparently hopeless minority. I advocated its 
cause, speaking day and night, at the risk of my health and of 
my life itself, which I counted as nothing compared with the in- 
terests of my country, when Fremont was our first notable candi- 
date. When Mr. Lincoln became our candidate I gave all I had 
of time, strength, influence, and persuasion, and when his elec- 
tion was ascertained and efforts were made to intimidate the 
North, and to prevent his being inaugurated, I went up and 
down through this country stiffening the backs of willow-backed 
patriots. I faced mobs, I preached day and night in my own 
church, to hold the North up to its own rights and interests. 
When the war broke out, I sent to it the only boy I had big 
enough to hold a musket. And as the war went on my contribu- 
tion could not be much, but such as it was I gave it — I gave it as 
a mother gives her breast to her child. 

"And when, seeking some rest from exhausting cares and 
labors, I went abroad, I did not suffer the grass to grow under 
my feet, but, in the face of royalty and aristocracy and of great 



582 BIOGRAPHY OF 

wealth in England, I upheld the justice and the rectitude of the 
cause for which we were all striving. And at every canvass from 
that day to this I have not held back health, strength, or influ- 
ence. Why, then, is it that I am now opposed to the organized 
movement of the Republican party ? That is a significant ques- 
tion. 

" I am now opposing the party whose cradle I rocked, be- 
cause I do not mean to be a pall-bearer to carry the coffin of 
that party to the grave. The Republican party is on its way to 
destruction, unless you turn the switch and run it on a side 
track. And by all my love of my country — and it is next to 
my love of my God — by all my pride in the past, I feel bound 
to do whatever God will inspire me to do, to stop the ruinous 
progress of the Republican party and to save it. 

" It behooves you, therefore, not to make mere amusement of 
the work of this evening. I speak to you as to a jury. The case 
before you is not that of some trembling culprit, or some wronged 
citizen seeking redress. It is your whole country that is before 
you to-night, whose cause I am to plead — to plead as if life or 
death hung on the issues. I am in dead earnest. It is very 
natural that men working through a political party, should, by 
and by, come to look upon all events in the community in their 
relation to party welfare and party success. But I, who have had 
nothing to do with parties, except as moral instruments, natur- 
ally look upon their movements and purposes from the moral 
standpoint. What are they attempting to do for this great peo- 
ple ? What does their success mean ? How does it stand along- 
side the intelligence, the morality, the true religion of thfs peo- 
ple, alongside that patriotism which rests its feet on morality, but 
whose head stands in the spirituality which connects man with 
God ? I study public affairs from the moral and religious stand- 
point, and that which is offensive to God may I never live to see 
the day when it may be acceptable to me and to my country- 
men. 

" Looking forward, as the pilot looks, what are our perils ? 
The war is over. The great questions that agitated the com- 
munity are past. You can't bring them back. There are, how- 
ever, two great dangers that betide our government. One is the 
danger that comes from the corrupt use of wealth ; the other, 
that which comes from the corruption of too-long-held power. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 583 

It is a common proverb, ' An honest man can bear watching ; a 
dishonest man needs it.' This is just as true of politics as of 
common procedure. This is the age of enterprise, of produc- 
tion, of commerce — of money. Russia, Austria, and France 
failed in their greatest recent wars and enterprises because those 
countries were honeycombed with official corruption. We are in 
danger from the same cause." 

He regarded the introduction of the moral element into poli- 
tics as an event of the greatest importance. 

Politics had become so eminently " practical " that any one 
who should suggest the wisdom, or even propriety, of basing poli- 
tical action on any moral principle, was in danger of being laugh- 
ed at as a "crank," " dude," or "political pharisee." 

And when in the birth of the Prohibition party, and the sud- 
den uprising of the Independent Republicans, he saw the attempt 
to found practical politics upon a purely moral foundation, he 
hailed them both as among the most hopeful signs of the times. 

Writing of these two movements, he said : 

*' Men of moral aims have been ruled out as impracticables, 
as ignorant of real politics, as enthusiasts and sentimentalists, 
as idealists and doctrinaires. This has been very true, and they 
have hitherto hung on the border of parties like a fringe of no 
substance or use. But the development of the party of Prohibi- 
tionists and of Independent Republicans is a disclosure, it seems 
to me, of a great providential development in politics, and that 
there is to be hereafter a place found for the moral elements in 
the politics of our country ! 

" I have spoken of the two formative elements as likely to 
coalesce. For, though there be thousands who cannot become 
technical prohibitionists, yet they will help them to create a 
higher moral sentiment on the subject of temperance." 

The results of the election and the part that Mr. Beecher 
took therein have become history, and need not be further de- 
tailed. 

Mr. Beecher's action was not, as has been erroneously sug- 
gested, caused by any sudden impulse. On the contrary, it was 
the result of careful and earnest deliberation, and was not taken 
until his mind was fully made up, and it retained the approval of 
his later judgment, after the heat and excitement of the contest 
had died out. 



584 BIOGRAPHY OF 

In his Thanksgiving sermons, it was his custom to review to 
some extent the political as well as material growth of the 
country, to find in both whatever there might be fit for thanks- 
giving. 

On Thanksgiving, 1884, he, at first, intended to review the 
course of the events of the campaign just completed, and com- 
menced a sermon for that purpose. After writing a part, he 
changed his plans and prepared another, in which he reviewed 
the reconstruction of the country since the war. From this we 
have quoted in a previous chapter. 

The manuscript of his unfinished sermon we have, and, though 
it is a fragment only, it will be of value as showing his more 
sober judgment, reviewing in retrospect the campaign just past 
and his part therein. 

" During the great political campaign which has just ter- 
minated, I have scrupulously refrained from introducing into the 
pulpit, or into the social meetings of this church, a word that, 
directly or indirectly, had any bearing upon politics. 

" Not that I had not the right, but because it was not expe- 
dient. Out of the bounds of the church I felt called to take an 
active part. 

" I am not willing that you should be ignorant of my inmost 
motives, and that you should have spread out before you the 
whole map of affairs as looked at from my standpoint. Many 
of you, steadfast friends, will not agree with my theory and judg- 
ment of my duty ; but you will acquit me of apostasy, or of in- 
consistency, and perhaps will even admit that, if my view of 
the whole condition of national affairs was correct, my action 
and career have been in one direction for forty years, and 
that the very influences which led me to help in the formation of 
the Republican party, to accept its hardships, its perils, its re- 
proaches, in all the successive periods of its development, have 
at this late day led me to dissent from its aims and policy. I 
have not left the party. I am standing on the very ground over 
which the battles have raged, when I have lost good repute and 
suffered endless revilings. 

" No, I have left nothing. If there has been any change, it 
is not in me. I would not take one step away from those great 
moral principles which have been the strength of this great his- 
toric party. 



RE V. HENR Y WA RD BEE CHER. 585 

" Others may think that I have mistaken the reality of affairs, 
and been misled by will-o'-wisp lights. 

" But, taking all counsel of all sobriety and deliberation, every 
true man must follow his own ripe judgment. I have followed 
mine, and, looking back over the canvass, I should be conceited 
indeed if I said that I had been perfect, had carried a cool in- 
tensity alw.ays, said nothing too severely. Accepting my own 
limitations, I nevertheless look back upon the past few months 
as wort-hy to be associated with the months and years of half a 
century of public labor, and indeed, if you will forgive the con- 
ceit, I regard this service as the very blossom of my life. 

" These words I speak to my friends and to my church. I 
owe no apology or explanation to the public. But to the great 
multitude of members of the Church and society, with whom so 
much of my life has been spent, whose friendship and love I have 
had, whose unity of hea' t and soul around me has been the source 
of so much gladness and strength ; to you, fathers, mothers, and 
friends of every name — to you, laying aside my too sensitive pride 
and my somewhat fierce sense of personal independence, I shall 
to-day unbosom myself, and shall try to give you a bird's-eye 
view of the condition of the United States at this hour, and my 
understanding of what it is that God's providence is calling us to. 

" I shall enumerate, point by point, the themes for thanksgiv- 
ing to-day : 

" To-day is waging a great battle between Optimism and Pes- 
simism. What is Optimism ? That happy temperament which 
leads one to see all things in a hopeful light and in a joyful cour- 
age. 

" What is Pessimism ? It is that structure of mind which 
inclines one to see all events in a sad and discouraging way. 
Either disposition carried to its farthest limit is unphilosophical. 
Good is not all good ; bad is not all bad. Good and evil are 
combined, like lights and shadows in art — sometimes, as in Rem- 
brandt, voluminous darkness nursing a small spot of light ; 
sometimes all light and hardly enough dark to cast a shadow. 

" In looking at our own day and our own country there is 
both light and shadow. There are reasons for criticism and re- 
gret, but more for gladness and thanksgiving. 

u Great excitements in monarchical governments are great 
dangers. When the government takes care of the people, the 



586 BIOGRAPHY OF 

people feel little need of caring for themselves. When the peo- 
ple, by the genius of their institutions, are to look out for them- 
selves, they learn how, like lofty trees, to let violent winds sway 
all their branches without disturbing the root. That is anchored 
fast. 

" The roaring anger of the wind and the sharp cry of anguish 
in the resisting branches soon pass and die away, and the tree, 
unclasped by the demon Storm, comes back to peace, only a few 
leaves lost, a few branches twisted. 

" Three weeks ago a foreigner, beholding the superlative ex- 
citement of the whole community, East, North, West, and South, 
would have thought that there could never be peace more. 
Newspapers flew like unquenchable arrows every whither, busi- 
ness was almost forgotten, the streets were crowded processions, 
meetings were convoked, and men of every profession, arguing, 
appealing, inflamed the people. Friends let go each other's 
hands, families were divided for a time. Words ran high, every 
truth, was carried to the utmost limit of violence. A wordy 
prophesy filled the land, of good or of evil. The lawyer forgot 
his brief, the artist his aesthetic dream, the merchant his bargains, 
the judge the plushy decorum of the bench. Refined ministers 
of the Gospel, loving elegant retiracy, burst forth in interviews. 
Venerable pastors presided at wild political demonstrations, and 
some even went forth speaking up and down the land, like Saul 
of old, in prophesying fury. Hundreds of honored and beloved 
ministers marched in full panoply of zeal, like Balaam of old, to 
curse. ... 

" Three weeks have passed ! It is all gone. No more ban- 
ners, lanterns, transparencies, or shouts of men. The lamps are 
out, the men gone home to work, trades resumed, the lawyer to 
the courts, the clergyman to his pulpit. The anger, the scare, 
the grief of surprise that everybody had, that everybody should 
have said or done what everybody did, is dying out, the sore 
places are healing, friends are reaching out kindly hands again. 

" The storm that darkened the heavens, the turbulent sea that 
thundered on the shore, have resumed their peaceful mien. The 
only mourners are they who sought and found not, who knocked 
and unto whom it was not opened. Even they will ere long 
cool their anger, shorten their sighs, and, like a weary child in its 
mother's lap, hide all its grief in sleep." 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 5S7 

Mr. Beecher was very much gratified, not only at the election 
of Mr. Cleveland, for whom he had grown to feel a strong person- 
al friendship, and in whose administration, despite the occasional 
mistakes that proved even the President to be subject to the 
fallibilities of mankind, he found so much of moral courage, firm- 
ness, and honest good sense to admire and approve, but in addi- 
tion to these reasons, he felt that an administration in which the 
South should be permitted to have a part, meant the reuniting of 
the country in fact as well as in name, and a fitting sequel to that 
reconstruction which he had so earnestly advocated nearly twenty 
years before. He had earnestly prayed that he might see the 
day when our country should be one nation, without the lines of 
a bitter sectionalism, dividing North from South or East from 
West ; and in his last year expressed the great satisfaction he felt 
in the part he had been permitted to play in bringing about such 
a result. 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

A Preacher — His Place — His Training — His Estimate of the Work— De- 
fects — Effectual Call — Upon Drawing an Audience — His Theory — Pre- 
paration-r-Results — A Theologian — His Orthodoxy — Evolution — Ordi- 
nances — Christian Unity — Sectarianism — Peacemaker. 

IT now belongs to us, among the closing chapters of this biog- 
raphy, to speak of Henry Ward Beecher, or rather to allow 
him, for the most part, to speak for himself, as a preacher, 
a theologian, and an administrator of ordinances — three spheres 
of activity so blended that it is of advantage to treat them to- 
gether. His doctrines necessarily shaped his preaching, his 
preaching colored and emphasized his theology, and both to- 
gether determined his estimate of the Church as an organized 
body, and the value of its rites and ceremonies. 

Among them, the preacher stood pre-eminent. He himself 
regarded preaching as especially his vocation, and in his judg- 
ment it ranked highest of all earthly pursuits. Nowhere else 
was he so happy as in this his chosen work. As a preacher he 
was most widely known, and for his labors in this sphere, we 
doubt not, he will be the longest remembered. 

His field was broader than was ever before given to any 
preacher, and no man that ever lived preached continuously to 
so large and influential audiences. During his forty years in 
Plymouth pulpit men from every part of the civilized world came 
to hear him, and to every part of the civilized world did his pub- 
lished sermons find their way, bringing instruction, inspiration, 
and comfort to multitudes. 

Of his rank as a preacher, it is not for us to speak dogmati- 
cally. We stood .too near him — perhaps all men of the present 
time stand too near him — to be impartial judges. Many letters 
and reports of sermons have come to us in which he is given the 
first place among the preachers of this age, and a few, among 
them some from men who themselves hold the first rank, place 

him before all preachers since the Apostle Paul. Which of these, 

588 



REV. HENRY WARD B EEC HER. 589 

or whether either, is the true estimate or not, it does not belong 
to us nor to any man living to decide ; but we believe that the 
latter judgment will in time largely prevail. 

The open heart that receives inspiration of God ; the pro- 
phetic insight of the true preacher that sees into the heart of 
things, and sees God there, and believes, with an intense convic- 
tion born of experience, that God's nature is love ; that this love 
is not for the Jew only, for those of favored lineage, of excellent 
position, of high moral standard and attainment, or of right be- 
lief, but is for the Gentile, for the wandering, the erring, the 
lost, outside the Church, outside even the sympathies and hope of 
religious men, the only power that can save, but able to save to 
the uttermost ; the ability to see this love incarnated in Jesus 
Christ and feel it as sunshine upon the soul, continually dispel- 
ling the darkness ; to love Him, as He is so manifested, with an 
all-absorbing passion of personal affection, before which all 
things pass away from their old adjustments and become new ; 
to see Him not only head of the Church, but head over all 
things ; to find in Him the centre of unity which the world 
needs, middle walls of partition between Jew and Gentile, be- 
tween learned and unlearned, between ranks and classes, be- 
tween science and religion, broken down ; the power to rejoice 
in sufferings for His sake, to bear without faltering, to love 
without failing, although " the more we love the less we be 
loved " ; the ability to open this Gospel to others, in speech that 
moved all hearts, as the winds move the tree-tops, that never 
touched an object, however common, but to leave it exalted, set 
in some new and higher relation ; the ability to move men to 
think, to act, to love- — all this, we believe, has never been pos- 
sessed to an equal degree with Mr. Beecher by any preacher 
since Saint Paul preached to the Athenians, taking the altar of 
the unknown god for his text ; since he described charity to the 
Corinthians, told the Colossians that all the creation consists, 
stands in harmony, in Jesus Christ, and wrote the Epistle to the 
Ephesians. Nor do we believe that to any one but to him 
has there been given a work that so nearly resembled that of 
the great Apostle to the Gentiles, whose part it was to bridge 
over by a living faith, or rather by faith in a living One, 
the vast differences that kept classes and orders and nationali- 
ties separate ; to give expression to the new and broader hope ; 



590 BIOGRAPHY OF 

to reconcile the old to the new and more vital faith, and show 
the relation of a risen Lord to a material universe. But in this 
we may be unduly prejudiced by our affection. We will let the 
sifting processes of the years decide. 

That he became a minister, as did his brothers, by reason 
of the unswerving faith and prayer of the parents, is already 
well known. " Out of six sons not one escaped from the pul- 
pit." " My mother dedicated me to the work of the foreign mis- 
sionary ; she laid her hands upon me, wept over me, and set me 
apart to preach the Gospel among the heathen, and I have been 
doing it all my life long, for it so happens one does not need to 
go far from his own country to find his audience before him." 

Ushered into the preparation for the ministry by the parental 
faith, stumbling and discouraged and ready to give up the work, 
another hand was not wanting to open still more clearly the way, 
draw back the curtains, and let in the light : 

" I beheld Him as a helper, as the soul's midwife, as the soul's 
physician, and I felt because I was weak I could come to Him ; 
because I did not know how, and, if I did know, I had not the 
strength, to do the things that were right — that was the invitation 
that He gave to me out of my conscious weakness and want. I 
will not repeat the scene of that morning when light broke fairly 
on my mind ; how one might have thought that I was a lunatic 
escaped from confinement ; how I ran up and down through the 
primeval forest of Ohio, shouting, ' Glory, glory ! ' sometimes in 
loud tones and at other times whispered in an ecstasy of joy and 
surprise. All the old troubles gone, and light breaking in on my 
mind, I cried : ' I have found my God ; I have found my God ! ' 
From that hour I consecrated myself to the work of the ministry 
anew, for before that I had about made up my mind to go into 
some other profession." 

His early training-school for effective preaching was well 
selected. It was, as is well known, one of the little villages on 
the banks of the Ohio River, where the wants of river barge- 
men and frontiermen demanded his attention. It was there he 
decided what his life-work should be. 

" ' My business shall be to save men, and to bring to bear 
upon them those views that are my comfort, that are the bread 
of life to me'; and I went out among them almost entirely cut 
loose from the ordinary church institutions and agencies, know- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 59 I 

ing nothing but ' Christ, and Him crucified,' the sufferer for 
mankind. Did not the men round me need such a Saviour ? 
Was there ever such a field as I found ? Every sympathy of my 
being was continually solicited for the ignorance, for the rude- 
ness, for the aberrations, for the avarice, for the quarrelsomeness 
of the men among whom I was, and I was trying every form and 
presenting Christ as a medicine to men. I went through the 
woods and through camp-meetings and over prairies. Every- 
where my vacations were all missionary tours, preaching Christ 
for the hope of salvation. I am not saying this to show you how 
I came to the knowledge of Christ, but to show you how I came 
to the habit and forms of my ministry. I tried everything on to 
folks." 

Added to the forces of experience and surroundings was 
always that of his own personal, natural endowment. This he 
found fault with and tried to change, as most people do at some 
period of their lives, but finally accepted and concluded to use as 
best he could, without murmuring, but always conscious of its 
limitations. 

" I have my own peculiar temperament, I have my own meth- 
od of preaching, and my method and temperament necessitate 
errors. I am not worthy to be related in the hundred-thousandth 
degree to those more happy men who never make a mistake in 
the pulpit. I make a great many. I am impetuous. I am in- 
tense at times on subjects that deeply move me. I feel as though 
all the ocean were not strong enough to be the power behind my 
words, nor all the thunders that were in the heavens, and it is of 
necessity that such a nature as that should give such intensity at 
times to parts of doctrine as to exaggerate them when you come 
to bring them into connection with a more rounded-out and 
balanced view. I know it — I know it as well as you do. I 
would not do it if I could help it ; but there are times when it is 
not I that is talking, when I am caught up and carried away so 
that I know not whether I am in the body or out of the body, 
when I think things in the pulpit that I never could think in the 
study, and when I have feelings that are so far different from any 
that belong to the lower or normal condition that I neither can 
regulate them nor understand them. I see things and I hear 
sounds, and seem, if not in the seventh heaven, yet in a condi- 
tion that leads me to understand what Paul said — that he heard 



592 BIOGRAPHY OF 

things which it was not possible for a man to utter. I am acting 
under such a temperament as that. I have got to use it, or not 
preach at all. I know very well I do not give crystalline views 
nor thoroughly guarded views ; there is often an error on this 
side and an error on that, and I cannot stop to correct them. A 
man might run around, like a kitten after its tail, all his life, if 
he were going around explaining all his expressions and all the 
things he had written. Let them go. They will correct them- 
selves. The average and general influence of a man's teaching 
will be more mighty than any single misconception, or misappre- 
hension through misconception." 

Successful as he was, he yet had none of the self-conceit that 
would lead him to believe that he had reached perfection ; on 
the contrary, his language was always that of one who had not 
yet attained, but was continually reaching out unto it. " Young 
gentlemen, I want to tell you true preaching is yet to come. Of 
all professions for young men to look forward to, I do not know 
another one that seems to me to have such scope before it, in the 
future, as preaching. 

" And as my years increase I want to bear a testimony. I 
suppose I have had as many opportunities as any man here, or 
any living man, of what are called honors and influence and 
wealth. The doors have been opened, the golden doors, for 
years. I want to bear witness that the humblest labor which a 
minister of God can do for a soul for Christ's sake is grander and 
nobler than all learning, than all influence and power, than all 
riches. And, knowing so much as I do of society, I have this 
declaration to make : that if I were called to live my life over 
again, and I were to have a chance of the vocations which men 
seek, I would again choose, and with an impetus arising from 
the experience of this long life, the ministry of the Gospel of 
Jesus Christ, for honor, for cleanliness, for work that never ends, 
having the promise of the life that now is as well as of that 
which is to come — I would choose the preaching of the Gospel : 
to them that perish, foolishness; to them that believe and accept 
it, life everlasting." 

And that not because of great success : " There is a deep en- 
joyment in having devoted yourself, soul and body, to the welfare 
of your fellow-men, so that you have no thought and no care but 
for them. There is a pleasure in that which is never touched by 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 593 

any ordinary experiences in human life. It is the highest. I 
look back to my missionary days as being transcendently the 
happiest period of my life. The sweetest pleasures I have ever 
known are not those that I have now, but those that I remember, 
when I was unknown, in an unknown land, among a scattered 
people, mostly poor, and to whom I had to go and preach the 
Gospel, man by man, house by house, gathering them on Sun- 
days, a few — twenty, fifty, or a hundred, as the case might be — 
and preaching the Gospel more formally to them as they were 
able to bear it." 

In his whole course we believe that he was as little moved 
by personal ambition as any man could possibly be. Upon his 
graduation he took the first church that asked for his services — 
as undesirable a church at that time probably, in position, char- 
acter, and strength, as could well have been found. And the 
two removes he made were the result of necessity rather than of 
choice. He had no large and stock sermons with which to 
awaken the admiration of men. Large subjects he had in plen- 
ty, but the sermon was such as grew at the time. 

From our knowledge of him we believe he spoke with abso- 
lute truthfulness when he says : 

" I have had no ambitions ; I have sought no laurels ; I have 
deliberately rejected many things that would have been conso- 
nant to my taste. It would have been for me a great delight to 
be a scholar ; I should have relished exceedingly to have per- 
fected my thought in the study, and to have given it such quali- 
ties as that it should stand as classics stand. But when the 
work was pressed upon me, and my relations to my own country 
and to mankind became urgent, I remember, as if it were but 
yesterday, when I laid my literary ambition and my scholarly 
desires upon the altar and said : ' If I can do more for my Mas- 
ter and for men by my style of thinking and working, I am will- 
ing to work in a second-rate way ; I am willing to leave writing 
behind my back ; I am willing not to carve statues of beauty, but 
simply to do the things that would please God in the salvation of 
men.' " 

He had not only no ambitions for himself, but he had no pa- 
tience in that seeking for place which, sometimes with the best 
of intentions, ministers adopt. We well remember how, early in 
our ministry, hearing that a larger church was offered to us, and 



594 BIOGRAPHY OF 

fearing lest, in our inexperienced zeal, we might accept, he tele- 
graphed us not to decide until we had seen him, but to come on 
to Brooklyn, that he might urge upon us the importance of a 
young man's staying in his first parish until " he had done some- 
thing," by which he meant doing the work he had gone there to 
undertake. 

Two things he considered essential to an effectual call to the 
minister to change his parish : one was " an open door in front, 
and the other was a kick from behind." It was not enough that 
there was an open door ; some pressure of health or dissatisfac- 
tion was needed to make a perfect call. What a man was to do 
when he got the kick, and there was no open door in front, we do 
not remember. 

Again he writes me : 

" My Dear Sam : 

" It is not needful that a Christian should be a Stoic, and in- 
different to all experiences of success and popularity among 
others ; yet, if a straightforward working man finds that he does 
not produce popular results, it is not for him to worry about it. 
If a man reaches the true spirit, he will find a certain high and 
solemn satisfaction, down deep in himself, that he is thoroughly 
and earnestly faithful without the outward signs and remunera- 
tions. 

" This is working ' as unto the Lord,' and not unto men. You 
will find much of this in Paul, who was not popular, as Apollos 
was, and who dug out his results by the hardest — and saw but little 
at that — of all his real usefulness. Read 2 Cor. xii. 12-15. That 
last verse is deeply affecting. It goes far beyond and below any 
experience that you or I ever had. As to the not drawing large 
audiences, my own experience is probably, in my early ministry, 
far less encouraging than yours. My Lawrenceburg church held 
about one hundred and fifty to two hundred, and was never 
crowded. At Indianapolis I never saw my church really full but 
three or four times. in eight years. I think that my audience for 
the first ten years of my preaching life did not average two hun- 
dred and fifty. 

" I never regarded myself as particularly popular, nor destined 
to any considerable success more than belongs to any hard-work- 
ing and sensible minister. The fact is, when I came East I came 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 595 

with a real but unexpressed determination to work hard for 
common folks •, and not to expect much ; and I have become thor- 
oughly seasoned to the feeling that large, hard, and painful work, 
heartily performed for Christ, is dearer to Him when it pays 
nothing outwardly to the doer, than when, by overt success, it 
gratifies the natural feelings. 

" In this, too, we must learn 'to walk by faith and not by sight,' 
by the inside eyes and not by the outside vision. 

"I think a minister who is discouraged should read the 
eleventh and twelfth chapters of Second Corinthians every week. 
It is the most wonderful record of experience ever penned, if 
you consider how uncomplaining — without acrimony — how cheer- 
ful, how wholesome and victorious is the whole spirit in which 
his career is recited. It is not the language of a discouraged and 
baffled man. It is the calm retrospect of a great nature, supe- 
rior in one part of his soul to experiences which he acutely feels 
in another part. 

" Yours lovingly, 

" H. W. Beecher." 

His theory of preaching, which came to be formed out of his 
experience of the grace of God and his labors for men, he him- 
self has given : 

" To preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ ; to have Christ so 
melted and dissolved in you that when you preach your own 
self you preach Him as Paul did; to have every part of you living 
and luminous with Christ, and then to make use of everything 
that is in you, your analogical reasoning, your logical reasoning, 
your imagination, your mirthfulness, your humor, your indigna- 
tion, your wrath ; to take everything that is in you all steeped in 
Jesus Christ, and to throw yourself with all your power upon a 
congregation — that has been my theory of preaching the Gospel. 
A good many folks have laughed at the idea of my being a fit 
preacher because I laughed, and because I made somebody else 
laugh. I never went out of my way to do it in my life ; but if 
some sudden turn of a sentence, like the crack of a whip, sets 
men off, I do not think any worse of it for that — not a bit. I 
have felt that man should consecrate every gift that he has got in 
him that has any relation to the persuasion of men and to the 
melting of men — that he should put them all on the altar, kindle 
them all, and let them burn for Christ's sake. I have never 



596 BIOGRAPHY OF 

sought singularity, and I have never avoided singularity. When 
they wanted some other sort of teaching I have always said, ' Get 
it. If you want my kind, here I am ready to serve you ; if you 
do not, serve yourself better.' " 

For this preaching there was always going on a certain prepa- 
ration, almost involuntarily. It consisted in a constant study of 
the processes of nature around him, examining them and digest- 
ing them, until he saw the relations in which they stood to 
other facts, and a principle was discovered or an illustration of 
some deeper moral and spiritual truth was gained. This action 
of his mind, we believe, became almost automatic. He had an 
insatiable curiosity to learn facts. But he wanted them for the 
same reason that a miller wants grain, to grind and make bread. 
So he worked them over until he had got something from them 
that fed his mind or heart, and this was the only way he could 
remember them. 

For this preaching there had been carried on for years a study 
of the Bible. The evidences, found in note-books and books of 
analysis, of his broad and painstaking study of the Gospels have 
astonished us. People seeing him ^always on the wing, finding 
him never in his study — in fact, having in his house no study-room, 
as such — got the impression that he worked but little ; but they 
made a great mistake. He worked, but it was in his own way. 
The winter that I saw him most he had Stanley's " Commentary 
upon the Epistles to the Corinthians," which he carried for weeks 
in his carpet-bag, studied, and annotated from beginning to end. 
Mr. Pond, who has travelled with him thousands of miles, says 
that Bible reading and study was a part of his daily work while 
on the train. 

The results of such reading and study appear in scores of 
little note-books that he used, some of which lie before us, con- 
taining subjects, heads of sermons jotted down at moments of 
inspiration, in the family circle, on the railroad, in the street-car, 
after a talk with some friend, written for the most part in that 
strong, full hand that is so well known, sometimes plainly, at 
other times so obscurely as to make it doubtful if he himself 
could read it after it had become cold. 

This was his method of getting subjects. These were the 
acorn thoughts, out of which grew up in time strong, wide- 
spreading oak-tree sermons. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 59^ 

With eyes wide open to see things, he kept his active sym- 
pathy and hearty fellow-feeling for men in exercise by constant 
intercourse with those about him. Some have a regard for 
mankind in general, but only criticism and coldness for the con- 
crete specimen before them. This was not the case with him ; 
he liked the common men of the present, and made it an object 
to get acquainted with them and to be with them. Very seldom 
did he cross the river on the ferry-boat but he made his way up 
into the pilot-house, to which a key had been given him, to have 
a talk with the pilot. 

We have been often asked, " How does Mr. Beecher prepare 
his sermons ? " His general preparation we have already given. 
The more special preparation for preaching on the Sabbath began 
on Saturday and consisted in doing as little work as possible — 
doing what pleased him, making it a kind of active rest-day. 
Perhaps, if the weather permitted, he ran up to Peekskill to look 
over the place, and get rid of all friction and rasp by giving at- 
tention to its common and homely details, or to feed his imagina- 
tion by looking out upon its beautiful landscape. Perhaps he 
spent it in the city. If so, he has probably been over to New 
York, looking into shop-windows, dropping into Appleton's to 
look at books, or into Tiffany's to look at gems, having a little chat 
in each place with some of the clerks. You may be sure he did 
not forget his afternoon nap of from one to two hours ; wherever 
he was he aimed to secure that. He has fed well to-day, but 
has been careful not to eat anything that does not agree with 
him. He will have the body in perfect order for the great 
work of the morrow. The evening he spent quietly at home, 
or, possibly, ran into one or two of the homes where he 
was most familiar, where he could have his own way and 
be not bored by anybody's trying to draw him out into 
some excited discussion. If you had followed him there 
you would very likely have found him taking his ease upon 
the sofa, while the family life went on around him, in which he 
took part by humorous sallies or quiet suggestions, as the fancy 
prompted him ; home and a few games of backgammon with Mrs. 
Beecher, and to bed by eleven o'clock. Up to this time he has 
not decided upon the subject or text that he will handle on the 
morrow ; to have chosen it so early as this, especially to have 
written any part of it down, would have killed his sermon the^ 



598 BIOGRAPHY OF 

next day. He could not have kindled up to it and made it a 
living thing, if it had been for so long a time buried on parch- 
ment. Even upon so important a matter as his first lecture of 
the Lyman Beecher lectureship in Yale College — a new enterprise, 
with the faculty of the college as well as the clergymen of the 
city present, and his lecture to be reported in the religious press — 
he did not touch pen to paper until after he had reached New 
Haven, taken dinner, had his nap, and was within an hour of its 
delivery, although of course the subject-matter had been for a 
long time a-brewing. Then while shaving the outline came clear 
to his mind, and he slashed his face with his razor in his eager- 
ness, but his lecture secured the hearty and grateful commenda- 
tion of Dr. Leonard Bacon, who said: "If I had heard such talk 
as that before I began to preach, it would have made a better 
preacher of me." 

The decision was made in a general way when he awoke in the 
morning — that is, the kind of sermon he would preach that day. If 
he was heavy and a little cloudy in the higher faculties, he would 
select a subject that was in harmony with that state of mind. If 
he was stirred in spirit and imagination, a subject that drew upon 
those higher elements, and that ministered to the same in others, 
would be decided upon. There was no approach to a sanctimo- 
nious expression on his face as he came down to the breakfast- 
table, and he did not refuse to take part in the conversation, 
whatever it might be ; and very likely there would some humor- 
ous remark drop from his lips, or he would steal the bread 
from the plate of one of the children as usual. Yet it was all 
done with the air of a man that had something that engaged his 
attention apart from us. Family prayers were likely to be short 
that morning, and if there were any of those delays that sometimes 
occur in the best-regulated families, he would depute some one 
else to conduct them. And then he locked himself in his own 
room, and for an hour and a half must be left undisturbed, 
except in the case of some imperative necessity, and then to be 
approached by no one but his wife. No noise in the halls. The 
hour of the whole week had come to him, and he must have it 
without interruption. Of course none of us, and no one but 
God, ever saw him in that hour, but we know that then he made 
his final and definite selection of a subject, perhaps taking it from 
one of those little note-books ; that he wrote with his goose-quill 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 599 

pen, upon large sheets of paper, his introduction ; that he put 
down head after head, with such opening as the time permitted, 
and gave a word of illustration here and there. The vision stood 
before him, and as hastily as possible he sketched the outline. 
As the bell began to ring for the last time, some fifteen minutes 
before the opening of the service, he would come out with his 
papers hastily thrown together and held in his hand, or thrust 
into his coat-pocket, and, with scarcely a word to any one, put 
on his hat, take Mrs. Beecher on his arm, and start for the 
church. 

This hour may be shortened. It may be spent in some other 
place than in his study, but as a rule it was had, this time of 
supreme choice and arrangement, and jotting down the heads of 
his sermon. As an extreme illustration of his powers of making 
all places available, and to seize the most outwardly unpropitious 
surroundings for this final preparation, I can say from personal 
knowledge that the notes of the sermon which he preached in 
Charleston in 1865 to the thousands in Zion Church, and which 
was one of great scope and power, was outlined in the outhouse of 
the home where we were stopping, on scraps of envelopes which 
he happened to have with him. From thence we went directly 
to the church and to the delivery of that grand sermon. When 
I spoke to him afterwards about the sermon and its power, he 
said : " The vision came to me there, and if I could only have 
brought it out as I saw it, it would have been worth hearing ; but 
I could not." 

When he preached upon the occasion of the two hundred 
and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Congregational 
Church in Stamford, he came into my house hastily, stopping 
only long enough to kiss his daughter as he hurried upstairs. In 
about fifteen minutes he came down, putting away some notes in 
his side-pocket, and said to her : " Well, I have got my sermon 
ready for the evening." This was in the forenoon. Being pre- 
pared so long beforehand, it got cold before the time for its de- 
livery, and when he went into the pulpit he felt barren and dry. 
Neitherthe singing by the choir nor the prayer by a brother minis- 
ter, of which he spoke afterwards very highly, gave him the desir- 
ed relief, and he sat with the fixed, settled expression of a man 
who is bound to do his duty as well as he can ; but to those who 
knew him well there was alack of the light in the eye and the 



600 BIOGRAPHY OF 

deep, full, restful look of countenance which was marked in him 
when he was all prepared. It happened that we had at that tinre 
a solo-singer of great richness and sweetness of voice, and she 
sang for an offertory just before preaching, " The Three Kings 
of the Orient." The sympathetic rendering of the words of that 
beautiful solo smote the rock ; the waters gushed out and suffus- 
ed soul and intellect, and the sermon was one of great power 
and beauty. 

Because of its adaptation to awaken devotion in his own 
heart and in the hearts of his audience he valued organ music, 
but it must be rendered by one who himself felt its power and 
could express this feeling through the instrument. If the or- 
ganist failed in this, no brilliancy of execution nor facility in ren- 
dering popular tunes could atone for the fundamental lack. By 
reason of John Zundel's ability to express and interpret religious 
emotion he valued him above all players that ever officiated at the 
organ in Plymouth Church. As with the organ, so with the 
choir. No efficiency in the leader of the choir, in the machinery, 
could atone for the lack of appreciation of the devotional ele- 
ment in the music. 

In the Scripture-reading he was himself, feeding upon the 
word which he read, drinking in and appropriating its truths ; 
and in the prayer he came to the fountain-head, to Christ Him- 
self, for refreshing and life power. 

And now for the sermon itself. For the first few moments 
his eyes followed the manuscript closely. He seemed to be read- 
ing ; perhaps he was, and perhaps there were only catch sentences 
upon the page which he was scanning so carefully. He was 
gathering his forces, getting under headway, making preparatory 
explanations, divisions, and definitions. He will get into the full, 
rushing current of thought and feeling and speech presently. 

We can liken the whole process to nothing better than the 
descent of some of our Western rivers under the care of a skilful 
guide. You get into the boat in some sheltered cove. He takes 
the oar and pushes out gently but strongly, points out the 
rocks on either side and avoids them, and makes his way around 
some tree-top that has fallen in from the shore. Like to this 
was often Mr. Beecher's opening. The current now is felt and 
begins to bear you along on its bosom, and in that hour all your 
,, life-experiences are gone over or pointed out to you. You ar* 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 6oi 

in the shallows where life seems poor and worthless, and he 
shows you how to find the deeper channels. He points out the 
pleasant places on the shore, and shows you where living springs 
burst out ; takes you under the shadow of the lofty trees whose 
branches sweep down within your reach, and anon out under the 
clear, sun-lighted heaven. Swirls of temptation are before you, 
and he shows you how to steer straight through or how to avoid 
them. You are now in the very rapids, in the rush of the life 
that for six days in the week is roaring around you, and all 
things seem to be rushing to destruction ; but this man is not 
disturbed. He is no still-water pilot. He has thoroughly stud- 
ied that river and knows all its dangers. Through the fiercest 
rapids that ever boat was called upon to pass he will guide you 
safely ; over the deepest fall that ever boats must venture he will 
stand by you. He goes with you until he has brought you into 
some quiet spot of God's great and present mercy, or perhaps to 
the mouth of the river and in sight of the islands of the blest. 
What a hand was that, so gentle, skilful, strong ! What a voice, 
so clear, tender, inspiring, confident ! What a heart, that knew 
all the ways of sorrow ! What a guide and helper he was ! 
" O my father ! my father ! the chariot of Israel and the horse- 
men thereof !" 

In the largeness of his audience, in his power over them for 
the time being, there can be no question ; but how about the per- 
manent results in growth and strength of Christian character, in 
making men and women Christlike ? — for this, as he would be 
first to claim, is the only true success. Our first witness here, of 
course, must be Plymouth Church, the body that received most 
impress from the word he preached and the life he lived. One 
of the largest churches in the land, it has been called a drag-net 
" which has been cast into the sea and has gathered of every 
kind." And undoubtedly it has its proportion of human weak- 
ness and imperfections, but, after making all deductions of this 
nature, it nevertheless remains true that, tried by all the tests 
that can apply to a church, it will answer as well as any that can be 
found. It has been singularly harmonious and free from quarrels 
and contention, and that under trials the like of which few churches 
have ever been called to endure. Its failures in Christian 
character have been as few ; its works have been as broad and 
beneficent ; its weekly care to provide for strangers that visited 



602 BIOGRAPHY OF 

it as hospitable ; its benevolent contributions as generous, we 
believe, as those of any other church. But, deeper than all this, 
and better than all, the spirit that has pervaded the church has 
been unusually kind, helpful, Christlike. 

It was said that it had no life separate from Mr. Beecher. 
But the bearing of that body since the death of its pastor has 
given an emphatic denial to that statement. From the day that 
his body lay in state, and its members gathered like a stricken 
household around the coffin, the church, to all outward appear- 
ances, has been growing more earnest in developing its powers, 
more loving in its spirit. The seed so long planted is bearing 
fruit, the benediction so long resting upon it is showing its 
beauty, and is proving that indeed it is the fruit of but one 
thing, and that is the Gospel of God's dear Son, of Jesus the 
Christ. 

But other witnesses rise up to testify — troubled, weary, heart- 
broken souls the world over, who have read the sermons as they 
have come to them from Plymouth pulpit; and they bear witness 
that this one spake as he was moved of the Holy Ghost, that his 
message was of Him who came to heal the sick, to raise the dead, 
to set at liberty the captive. 

We call to the witness-stand all ministers and all denomina- 
tions of every name who have ever read his sermons or heard 
him preach, and they will testify that his message was of God. 

Yea, we will go beyond this circle and ask those of other pur- 
suits — laborers, workers, soldiers, actors — if there has not shone 
upon them something of the light that our Saviour shed upon all 
classes and conditions of men, and their answer will be unani- 
mously in the affirmative. We go beyond the personality of 
men and come into the realm of beliefs and relationships, and 
affirm, without fear of denial, that theology is to-day more truth- 
ful, science more devout, religion more attractive, sectarianism 
less bitter, churches more loving, politics purer, property more 
humane, labor more faithful, social ranks more tolerant, and 
nations brought nearer together, by reason of the preaching of 
the Gospel by Henry Ward Beecher. 

To speak of Mr. Beecher as a theologian will awaken, we are 
well aware, a smile of incredulity with many. It will be said that 
theology was not his forte; that he seldom made use of the term 
except to make fun of it, or of those who were its exponents and 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER 603 

teachers. Now, we acknowledge that we might give a definition 
of this science in which he would appear to very poor advantage. 
But if theology can be considered as the knowledge of God in 
His relations to living men and to this present world, then was 
Mr. Beecher a theologian excelled by few now living or that ever 
have lived. He had this knowledge of God. It was as real to him 
as his own existence. He had the nature and order of God's at- 
tributes very clearly settled in his own mind. He had His rela- 
tions with the whole universe in which He dwelt very thoroughly 
outlined in his thought. He had his own system, upon which he 
worked from day to day, which included all existences and orders, 
and all times, and all worlds ; that, as he believed, had a place for 
all truth that had ever been lived or revealed, and for all that 
ever should be lived or revealed, here, or in Saturn, or Sirius, in 
this present time or in the ages of ages. He made a great deal 
of fun of theologians, sometimes because of the one-sidedness of 
their views, sometimes because of their dryness, at others be- 
cause of their pretensions, and partly because all classes of men 
were, in his view, at times objects of legitimate mirth-making. 
Yet nevertheless he greatly valued them and their work. 

" Now, young gentlemen," he said in his " Lectures to Yale 
Students," " I have often indulged myself in words that would 
seem to undervalue theologians ; but you know I do not mean it, 
I profess to be a theologian myself; my father was a theologian ; 
my brothers are all theologians, and so are many men whom I 
revere, and who are the brightest lights of genius, I think, that 
have ever shone in the world. I believe in theologians, and 
yet I think it is perfectly fair to make game of them ! I do not 
think there is anything in this world, whether it be man or that 
which is beneath a man, that is not legitimate food for innocent, 
innocuous fun ; and if it should cast a ray of light on the truth 
and alleviate the tediousness of a lecture now and then to have a 
slant at theologians, why, I think they can stand it ! It will not 
hurt them and it may amuse us. So let me speak freely — the 
more so because I affirm that it is indispensable for every man 
who is to do a considerable religious work during a long period. 
or with any degree of self-consistency, to be a theologian. He 
must have method ; there must be a sequence of ideas in his 
thoughts. And if the work runs long enough and far enough, 
and embraces many things, there must be a system of applying 



604 BIOGRAPHY OF 

means to ends, there must be a knowledge of instruments. 
These things are theology in a sense — a part of it, at any rate." 

Equally indispensable, in his view, was it that a man have a 
theology that would change by growth : 

"As summer makes the tree so much larger that the bark 
has to let out a seam, because the old bark will not do for the 
new growth, and as the same thing takes place from season to 
season, so mental philosophy — for all theology is mental philoso- 
phy — changes from age to age through both obvious and latent 
causes." 

His bearing towards theological questions was largely decid- 
ed, as he tells us, by his own religious experience, and by the 
controversies which in his early life were raging around him : 

" In the first place, let me say that my early religious experi- 
ence has colored all my life. I was sympathetic by nature, I was 
loving, I was mercurial, I was versatile, I was imaginative. I was 
not a poet executively, but sympathetically I was in union with 
the whole universal life and beauty of God's world and with all 
human life. My earliest religious training was at home. My 
father's public teaching may be called alleviated Calvinism. 
Even under that the iron entered my soul. There were days 
and weeks in which the pall of death over the universe could not 
have made it darker to my eyes than those in which I thought : 
' If you are elected you will be saved, and if you are not elected 
you will be damned, and there is no hope for you.' I wanted to 
be a Christian. I went about longing for God as a lamb bleating 
longs for its mother's udder, and I stood imprisoned behind 
those iron bars : ' It is all decreed. It is all fixed. If you are 
elected you will be saved anyhow ; if you are not elected you 
will perish.' While in that state, and growing constantly and 
warmly in sympathy with my father, in taking sides with ortho- 
doxy that was in battle in Boston with Unitarianism, I learned of 
him all the theology that was current at that time. In the quarrels 
also between Andover and East Windsor and New Haven and 
Princeton — I was at home in all these distinctions. I got the 
doctrines just like a row of pins on a paper of pins. I knew them 
as a soldier knows his weapons. I could get them in battle array. 
I went from my college life immediately to the West, and there I 
fell into another fuliginous Christian atmosphere when the Old 
School and the New School Presbyterians were wrangling, and the 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 605 

Church was split, and split on the rock of slavery, and my father 
was tried for believing that a man could obey the commandments 
of God, and Dr. Wilson was contending against him in church 
courts that men had no ability, either moral or physical, to obey 
God ; and the line of division ran all through the State, and 
there was that tremendous whirl of Old School theology, old 
Calvinism and new Calvinism, and by the time I got away from 
the theological seminary I was so sick — no tongue can tell how 
sick I was of the whole medley. How I despised and hated this 
abyss of whirling controversies that seemed to me to be filled 
with all manner of evil things, of everything, indeed, but Christ ! 
And then on one memorable day, whose almost every cloud I 
remember, whose high sun and glowing firmament and waving 
trees are vivid yet, there arose before me, as if an angel had 
descended, a revelation of Christ as being God, because He 
knew how to love a sinner; not that He would love me when 
I was true and perfect, but because I was so wicked that I should 
die if He did not give Himself to me, and so inconstant that I 
never should be steadfast — as if He were saying to me: ' Because 
you are sinful I am yours/ Before that thought of a God who 
sat in the centre and seat of power, that He might bring glory 
and restoration to everything that needed Him, I bowed down in 
my soul, and from that hour to this it has been my very life to 
love and to serve the all-helping and pitiful God." This was 
addressed to the association of which he was a member. 

One who was present wrote that while he was saying this "he 
seemed to lose consciousness of his audience ; his voice, although 
clear and distinct, became low and gentle; he was carried away 
by one of those very inspirations which he was describing; and 
when he spoke of the revelation of Christ to himself, as one who 
loved men because they needed love, his face underwent a mar- 
vellous change : it seemed transparent with a radiant light, like a 
sunset glow on the Alps, while rapid and instantaneous changes 
of expression passed over it, such as can only be compared to 
heat-lightning silently playing over the golden clouds of a sum- 
mer evening." 

From this living experience there came into existence an 
order of truths. " As I went on, and more and more tried to 
preach Christ, the clouds broke away and I began to have a dis- 
tinct system in my own mind." There grew up also a very 



6c6 B10GRAPH Y OF 

decided dislike and oppugnance to much of the theology that 
was then in vogue, for it seemed to stand in the way of men 
instead of helping them : 

" I dedicated myself, not to be a fisher of ideas, nor of books, 
nor of sermons, but a fisher of men, and in this work I very soon 
came to the point in which I felt dissatisfied with the views of 
God that had been before given. I felt dissatisfied with that 
whole realm of theology which I now call the machinery of reli- 
gion, which has in it some truth, and I would it had more. But 
I came to have this feeling, that it stood in the way of sinful 
men. I found men in distress, in peril of soul, on account of 
views which I did not believe were true, or, if true, not in any 
such proportion. If you want to know why I have been fierce 
against theology, that is it : because I thought with Mary, and I 
said time and again, 'They have taken away my Lord, and I 
know not where they have laid Him.' It seemed to me that men 
could not believe in such a God as I heard preached about, that 
men could not believe such a schedule of truth as I had seen 
crystallized and promoted among men. I do not care the turn 
of my hand about a man's philosophy ; I do not care about one 
system or another ; any system that will bring a man from dark- 
ness to faith and love I will tolerate ; and any system that lets 
down the curtain between God and men, whether it is canonical 
priest or church service or church methods, whether it is the 
philosophical or theological — anything that blurs the presence of 
God, anything that makes the heavens black and the heart hope- 
less, I will fight it to the death." 

But how about his orthodoxy? He says : "I hold there is 
but one orthodoxy, and that all others are bastard orthodoxies. 
The orthodoxy of the heart, that loves God, and loves man to such 
an extent that it is willing to suffer for him, and to endure hard- 
ship for the sake of the love it bears to men — that is the true 
orthodoxy, and there is none other." 

He said in an address given at a meeting of Congregational 
ministers in London in September, 1886 : 

"I think I am as orthodox a man as there is in this world. 
Well, what are the tests of orthodoxy? Man universally is a 
sinner ; man universally needs to be born again ; there is in the 
nature of God that power and influence that can convert a man 
and redeem him from his animal life ; and it is possible for man 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. to J 

so to bring to bear this divine influence in the ministration of the 
Gospel as that men shall be awakened, and convicted, and con- 
verted, and built up in the faith of Jesus Christ. There is my 
orthodoxy. But how about the Trinity? I do not understand 
it, but I accept it. If anybody else understands it I have not 
met him yet ; but it seems to me that that is the easiest way of 
rendering the different testimonies or words of truth in the New 
Testament, neither do I see any philosophical objection to it at 
all, and I accept it without questioning. What about original 
sin ? There has been so much actual transgression that I have 
not had time to go back on to that. On what grounds may a 
man hope ? On the atonement of Christ ? Yes, if you want to 
interpose that word, atonement, on that ground, unquestionably, 
I am accustomed to say Christ saves men. But how ? That is 
His look-out, not mine. I think that because the nature of God 
is sanative, God is love. ' If ye, being evil, know how to give 
good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father 
which is in heaven give good gifts to them which ask Him ? ' If 
you choose to fix it in this way, and say that Christ saw it possi- 
ble to do thus and so, and that was the atonement He made — if 
you take any comfort in it, I shall not quarrel with you. But it 
is enough for me to know this, that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, 
has proclaimed, to whosoever will, health, life, new life — ' born 
again.' He has offered these, and therefore I no more want 
to question how he does it than a sick man questions the doctor 
before he takes a pill. If he says, ' Doctor, what is in it ? ' the 
doctor says, ' Take it and. you will find out what is in it.' If 
men think I am heterodox because I do not believe this, that, 
and the other explanation of the atonement of Jesus Christ, it is 
enough for me to say I believe in Christ, and I believe Christ is 
atonement. Now, if you ask me whether I believe in the divinity 
of Christ, I do not believe in anything else. Let a man stand 
and look at the sun, then ask him what he sees beside. Nothing: 
it blinds him. There is nothing else to me when I am thinking 
of God : it fills the whole sphere, the heaven of heavens, and the 
whole earth and all time ; and out of that boundlessness of love 
and that infiniteness of divine faculty and capacity it seems to me 
that He is, to my thought, what summer is when I see it march- 
ing on after the cold winter is over. I know where the light 
comes from and where the warmth comes from. When I see any- 



60S BIOGRAPHY OF 

thing going on for good and for the staying of evil I know it is 
the Sun of Righteousness, and the name to me is Jesus — every 
time Jesus. For Him I live, for Him I love, for Him I labor, for 
Him I rejoice in my remaining strength, for Him I thank God 
that I have yet so much in me that can spend and be spent for 
the only one great cause, which should lift itself above every 
other cause in this whole world." 

Concerning one other doctrine, future punishment, he states 
his belief as follows : 

" I have my own philosophical theories about the future life ; 
but what is revealed to my mind is simply this : The results of a 
man's conduct reach over into the other world on those that are 
persistently and inexcusably wicked, and man's punishment in 
the life to come is of such a nature and of such dimensions as 
ought to alarm any man and put him off from the dangerous 
ground and turn him toward safety. I do not think we are au- 
thorized by the Scriptures to say that it is endless in the sense in 
which we ordinarily employ that term. So much for that, and 
that is the extent of my authoritative teaching on that subject." 

From his life-long interest in material science it may well be 
supposed that he watched the development of the theory of evo- 
lution with the greatest eagerness. It was not, in substance, un- 
known to him : 

" Slowly, and through a whole fifty years, I have been under 
the influence, first obscurely, imperfectly, of the great doctrine 
of evolution. In my earliest preaching I discerned that the 
kingdom of heaven is a leaven, not only in the individual soul 
but in the world ; the kingdom is as a grain of mustard-seed. I 
was accustomed to call my crude notion a seminal theory of the 
kingdom of God in this world. Later I began to feel that sci- 
ence had struck a larger view, and that this unfolding of seed 
and blade and ear in spiritual things was but one application of 
a great cosmic doctrine which underlay God's methods in uni- 
versal creation, and was notably to be seen in the whole develop- 
ment of human society and human thought. That great truth — 
through patient accumulations of fact, and marvellous intuitions 
of reason, and luminous expositions of philosophic relation, by 
men trained in observation, in thinking, and in expression — has 
now become accepted throughout the scientific world. Certain 
parts of it yet are in dispute, but substantially it is the doctrine 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 609 

of the scientific world. And that it will furnish — nay, is already 
bringing — to the aid of religious truth as set forth in the life and 
teachings of Jesus Christ a new and powerful aid, fully in line 
with other marked developments of God's providence in this His 
world, I fervently believe." 

He had great hope from the influence he felt certain it would 
exert : 

" The theology that is rising upon the horizon will still rise. 
I cannot hope that it will be the perfect theology, but it will be 
a regenerated one, and I think far more powerful than the old — 
a theology of hope, and of love, which shall cast out fear. Nay, 
more, it is to be a theology that will run nearer to the spirit and 
form of Christ's own teachings, He who found the tenderness of 
Divine Providence in the opening lilies of the field, and the 
mighty power of God's kingdom in the unfolding of germ and 
leaf and fruit." 

Mr. Beecher's view of ordinances was in harmony with his 
practical view of preaching and of theology. To his mind the 
ordinance was appointed by God because it helped men, and was 
to be continued on that same ground, and the form best suited 
to that end was the one he adopted. The form of church govern- 
ment and of administration of ordinances was left uncertain, be- 
cause it was to be adapted to the peculiar conditions of the times 
or the circumstances of people. It was of principle rather than 
of rule. It was the expression of the new life rather than of 
any artificial arrangement. Hence he believed that different 
forms of church government and different methods of admin- 
istering ordinances were equally Scriptural, and to be adopted 
without controversy if they secured the end in view — the bringing 
into and training up of men in Christ Jesus — and equally antago- 
nistic to the New Testament view when they were a mere form. 

But of this he himself has spoken somewhat at length : 

" Now, there is one more thing that I want to say something 
about — that is, church economy, ordination, and ordinance. I 
regard it as true that there is laid down in the New Testament 
no form of church government whatever nor of church ordinance 
— none. Paul did not see the outlines of the Church; they grew, 
they developed out of the nature of things. And so I say, in 
regard to all church worship, that is the best form of church 
economy that in the long run helps men to be the best Chris- 



6lO BIOGRAPHY OF 

tians. Whatever thing is found when applied to human nature 
to do good, that is God's ordinance. If there are any men that 
worship God through the Roman Catholic Church — and there 
are — I say this in regard to them: 'I cannot, but you can; God 
bless you !' In that great, venerable church there is Gospel 
enough to save any man, no man need perish for want of light 
and truth in that system; and yet what an economy it is, what an 
organization, what burdens, and how many lurking mischiefs that 
temptation will bring out ! I could never be a Roman Catholic, 
but I could be a Christian in a Roman Catholic Church; I could 
serve God there. I believe in the Episcopacy — for those that 
want it. Let my tongue forget its cunning if I ever speak a 
word adverse to that church that brooded my mother, and now 
broods some of the nearest blood kindred I have on earth. It is 
a man's own fault if he do not find salvation in the teachings and 
worship of the great Episcopal body of the world. I was for ten 
years a member of the Presbyterian Church, for I swore to the 
Confession of Faith ; but at that time my beard had not grown. 
'The rest of the Book of Worship has great wisdom in it, and, 
rather than not have any brotherhood, I would be a Presbyterian 
again if they would not oblige me to swear to the Confession of 
Faith. On the other hand, my birthright is in the Congregational 
Church. I was born in it, it exactly agreed with my tempera- 
ment and my ideas; and it does yet, for although it is in many 
respects slow-moulded, although in many respects it has not the 
fascinations in its worship that belong to the high ecclesiastical 
organizations, though it makes less for the eye and less for the 
ear, and more for the reason and the emotions, though it has 
therefore slender advantages, it has this : that it does not take 
men because they are weak and crutch them up upon its wor- 
ship, and then just leave them as weak after forty years as they 
were when it found them. A part of its very idea is so to meet 
the weakness of men as that they shall grow stronger ; to preach 
the truth and then wait till they are able to seize that truth and 
live by it. It works slowly, but I tell you that when it has 
finished its work it makes men in the community." 

" I immerse, I sprinkle, and I have in some instances poured, 
and I never saw there was any difference in the Christianity that 
was made. They have all, for that matter, come out so that I 
should not know which was immersed or which was sprinkled. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 6 1 1 

" The unity of Christians does not depend upon similarity of or- 
dinance or methods of worship. It is a hard business. I do not be- 
lieve the millennium will see one sect, one denomination, anymore 
than the perfection of civilization will see only one great phalans- 
tery, one family. The man on this side of the street keeps house 
in one way, and the man over on the other side keeps house in 
another. They do not quarrel ; each lets the other alone. So I 
hold about churches. The unity of the Church is to be the unity 
of the hearts of men — spiritual unity in the love of Christ and 
in the love of each other. Do not, then, meddle with the details 
of the way in which different persons choose to conduct their 
service. Let them alone ; behave at least as decently in the 
church of Christ as you would do in your neighborhood and in 
each other's families. I do not know why they should not con- 
currently work in all the great causes of God among mankind. I 
am not, therefore, to teach Congregationalism, I am not to teach 
the Baptist doctrine, I am not to teach Presbyterianism ; I am to 
preach ' O ye that are lost by reason of your sins, Jesus Christ 
has found a ransom for you ; come, come, and ye shall live.' 
That is my message, and in that I have enthusiasm. It is not to 
build up one church or another church, or to cry down one 
church or another. Brethren, we have been trying conscience for 
a great while ; what have we got by it ? About one hundred and 
fifty denominations. There is nothing so unmanageable as a 
conceited conscience. Now, suppose we should try another 
thing ; suppose we should try love a little while ; suppose we 
should try sympathy, trust, fellowship, brotherhood, without 
inquisitorial power ; suppose we should let men's theologies 
take care of themselves, and bring this test to bear upon 
them : What is the fruit of their personal living, and what is the 
fruit of their personal teaching ? ' By their fruits shall ye know 
them' did not exhaust itself in personal thought alone. It is a 
good test for denominationalism, and whenever I find a denomi- 
nation that puts emphasis upon holiness, where there is no envy, 
nor detraction, nor backbiting, nor suspicion, nor holding each 
man to philosophical schedules, when I find a denomination in 
which they are full of love and gentleness and kindness, I am 
going to join that denomination. But I do not expect to change 
for some time." 

His estimate of sectarianism was very low : 



6 1 2 BIOGRAPHY OF 

. " The selfishness that inheres in the very elements of secta- 
rianism is radically opposed to the spirit of the Gospel. Love 
works from within outward. Selfishness or sectarianism works 
from without inward. One is centrifugal, the other is centripe- 
tal. The only difference between a pious denominational spirit 
and sectarianism is the difference between a cub and a full- 
grown wolf. You may baptize your wolf every year with what 
soft names you please ; it is a wolf still, that will never cease to 
make havoc on the flock. As for ourselves, in all this tumult of 
men running up and down throughout the vast and misty realm 
of ecclesiasticism, we will none of it. There is a fairer realm^ 
there are brighter skies, distilling selecter influences. We are 
well satisfied that this world will never behold any earthly force 
so great as the heart of man irradiated by the fire of Christ, and 
turned in all its warmth upon men ; hence our prayer for our 
brethren shall not be for esprit de corps but for esprit de Christ." 

And so, wherever he was, we find him bearing one charac- 
ter. In the matter of rituals he grasped the reality, as he 
thought, and, looking at men on either side of him, asking, not 
surrender of principle, but charity. And all sects found that 
they had something in common with him. 

In doctrines, while accused of heresy, yet, when making a full 
statement of his belief before the New York and Brooklyn Asso- 
ciation, or the meeting of Congregational ministers in England, 
his views received the heartiest commendation from men of all 
shades of opinion ; while as a preacher what multitudes of every 
class and of all sects have been brought together in Plymouth 
Church ! 

Among parties, except when in the very onset, it was the 
same. When the battle had been fought, not a blow more than 
was necessary to secure the victory, not an act for revenge. In 
the very midst of the war of the Rebellion, in 1862, as we have 
already mentioned, he said, "I think I never pray for the loyal 
States without praying, at least in thought, if not in utterance, for 
those misguided men in the South that wage this rebellion ; and, 
let me tell you, I have a tender place in my heart for them." 
And when the war had ceased he stood up for what he deemed 
best for their prosperity, at the loss, for the moment, of a great 
deal of his popularity at the North. In England he plead, 
with no tones of fear but with manly words, for peace between 



REV. HENRY WARD B EEC HER. 613 

the mother and daughter. In this age of spiritual growth on 
one side and materialistic tendencies on the other, Mr. Beecher, 
born with an intense love for nature, given a surpassingly deep 
and rich Christian experience, and reconciling them both in him- 
self, and feeling that each interprets and enriches the other, and 
both are unified in Him who is the head over all, became — he 
was raised up for that purpose — a mediator between the deep- 
est spiritual experience and the most advanced stage of real 
science. 

One scene illustrates his true position — the place he has 
held between many diversities, and the one that we are sure 
will be more and more recognized as his as the years go by. It 
was when the delegates from England were presenting their cre- 
dentials to the National Council of Congregationalists in Boston, at 
about the close of the war. There was a very sore feeling in the 
hearts of many of the loyal people of the North at the position of 
antagonism that their brethren in England and Wales had taken in 
the great Rebellion, and it happened that the delegates present had 
belonged very decidedly to the obnoxious side. The question 
was upon receiving them, and several speeches had been made, 
and it seemed that a very unpleasant result would be reached. 
At last Mr. Beecher was recognized and called to the platform. 
In a few words he described the situation, represented the failure 
of each side in the great matter of Christian charity, showed 
how grand an opportunity was given to illustrate this highest of 
Christian virtues, and closed by reaching down and clasping a 
hand of each delegate, while the whole audience of venerable 
ministers and delegates arose and showed their delight by cheers 
and waving of handkerchiefs. It was his rightful place, won 
by years of patient charity. Other names have been given him. 
He has been called Reformer, War Trumpet, Popular Lecturer, 
Preacher. They are all good, but we lift a name that we never 
remember to have seen applied to him, but which is his by right, 
which represents the resultant of all his life of toil and battle — 
the name which belongs to him as to but few men that ever lived 
— and place it lovingly upon his brow, while our eyes long for 
the look which he used to give : the name " Peacemaker " ; and 
the familiar words come with a new significance as if spoken for 
him, " Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the chil- 
dren of God." 



CHAPTER XXX. 

Love of the Country — Communion with Nature — Farming at Salisbury — 
Lenox — Matteawan — The Peekskill Farm. 

LIKE the fabled Antaeus of old, Mr. Beecher found strength 
by contact with old Mother Earth ; not only that, but 
rest, health, and inspiration ; while from the study of nat- 
ural processes, in which he delighted, he gained a deep insight 
into the beautiful and, to so many eyes, hidden mysteries of na- 
ture, which was a never-failing source of comfort and pleasure to 
him through all his life — a rich treasury, from which he drew so 
much of that illustrative imagery which illuminated and beautified 
his writings and speeches. If Earth was the mother, Nature was 
the grandmother, equally beloved and loving. Nothing that came 
from her hands was uninteresting ; each and every of her children 
found a true and faithful brother in Mr. Beecher, to whom in 
turn they showed that trust and confidence that opened up to him 
such glorious visions, such secrets, full of exquisite beauty, vouch- 
safed to but few among mankind. Of course he was fond of fish- 
ing and hunting. Not that he ever shot or caught anything : he 
was generally innocent of any such charge. He loved to tramp 
the woods, and stroll along the brookside, ostensibly hunting or 
fishing, but really communing with nature. The gun and rod 
were only for pretext. We take his own confessions : 

"But, aside from the pleasure which arises in connection 
with seeking or taking one's prey, we suspect that the collateral 
enjoyments amount, often, to a greater sum than all the rest : 
the early rising, the freshness of those morning hours preceding 
the sun, which few anti-piscatory critics know anything about ; 
that wondrous early-morning singing of birds, compared to which 
all after-day songs are mere ejaculations — for such is the tumult 
and superabundance of sweet noise, soon after four o'clock in 
summer, that one would think that if every dewdrop were a mu- 
sical note, and the bird shad drank them all, they could not have 

been more multitudinous or delicious. Then there is that incom- 

614 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECHER. 6 I 5 

parable sense of freedom which one has in remote fields, in for- 
ests, and along the streams. His heart, trained in life to play 
with jets, like an artificial fountain, seems, as he wanders along 
the streams, to resume its own liberty, and, like a meadow-brook, 
to wind and turn, amid flowers and fringing shrubs, at its own 
unmolested pleasure. 

" Care and trouble, in ordinary life, and especially in cities, 
disturb the fountains of feeling, as rubbish fallen into the foun- 
tains of ruined cities in the East chokes them, or splits and scat- 
ters their streams through all secret channels. 

" One who believes God to have made the world, and to have 
expressed His own tastes and thoughts in the making, cannot 
express what feelings those are which speak music through his 
heart. A little plant growing in silent simplicity in some covert 
spot, or looking down upon him from out of a rift in some rock 
uplifted high above his reach or climbing — what has it said to 
him, that he stops and gazes as if he saw more than material 
forms? What is that rush of feeling in his heart, and that strange 
opening up of thoughts, as if a revelation had been made to him ? 
Who that has a literal eye could see anything but that solitary 
flower casting a linear shadow on the side of the gray rock — a 
shadow that loves to quiver, and nod, and dance to every step 
which the wind-blown flower takes ? But this floral preacher up 
in that pulpit has many a time preached tears into my eyes, and 
told me more than I was ever able to tell again. 

" Indeed, in many and many a tramp the best sporting was 
done on my back. Flat under a tree we lay, a vast Brobdingnag, 
upon whom grasshoppers mounted, and glossy crickets crept, 
harmless, with evident speculation of what such a phenomenon 
could portend. Along the stems creep aspiring ants, searching 
with fiery zeal for no one can even tell what. The bluejay is in the 
tree above you. The woodpecker screws round and round the 
trunk, hammering at every place like an auscult doctor sounding 
a patient's lungs. Little birds fly in and about, gibbering to each 
other in sweet little detached sentences, confidentially talking 
over their family secrets, and expressing those delicate sentiments 
which one never speaks above a whisper in twilight. When you 
rise, the birds flutter and fly, and clouds of insects fly off from 
you like sparks from a fire when a log rolls over. The brook that 
gurgled past the tree, feeding its roots, and taking its pay in sum- 



6 1 6 BIO GRAPH Y OF 

mer shadows, varied every hour, receives a portion of out-jump- 
ing fry. Far off their coming shines. But before they had even 
touched the water, that bold trout sprung sparkling from the sur- 
face and sunk as soon, leaving only a few bubbles to float down. 
There ! if the trout has a right to his grasshopper, have I not a 
right to the trout ? I'll have him ! After several throws I find 
that it takes two to make a bargain. 

" At length one must go home. I never turn from the silence 
of the underbrush, or the solitude of the fields, or the rustlings of 
the forest, without a certain sadness as if I were going away from 
friends." 

Flowers and birds were his delight. Every spring he watched 
almost impatiently for the first arbutus, anemone, bloodroot, and 
violet, and enjoyed their short stay with an intensity that years 
increased rather than abated. The first song of the robin, the 
first plaintive note of the bluebird, and the sweet lay of the song- 
sparrow were each year listened for, and eagerly announced to 
the family with all the enthusiasm of early boyhood. Through 
the summer he watched and cared, with tender solicitude, for the 
roses, lilies, dahlias, and chrysanthemum, with the many, many 
other of the flower- world which he always had about him. And 
as each in its turn lived out its short span, faded, and fell, he 
watched the scattering petals almost mournfully, finding consola- 
tion only in the certainty of their return another year. 

Each season with its many changing moods was a living alle- 
gory to him. 

Spring was the young child just born, full of smiles, of 
tears, and winsome ways — the beginnings of life. Summer was 
early maturity, in which the first promises of fruitage were be- 
ginning to be fulfilled. Steadier and more sober, with increas- 
ing responsibilities. Fall perfected maturity with its full fruit- 
age. Early winter, extreme old age, lingering at the threshold 
of the grave. Midwinter, nature's death, which, like the soul's, 
ends not in destruction, but only rests awhile to awaken into a 
more glorious resurrection. 

Nature was to him God's book wide open, each leaf free and 
unbound, filled with that which comforted his soul and confirm- 
ed his faith. 

Not even in evolution, that bugbear of so many of his cleri- 
cal brethren, did he find anything to disturb his trust in God, 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECH ER. 6 I J 

his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, or his confidence in the Bible, 
as life's guide-book ; but quite the contrary. He found his trust, 
his faith and confidence, strengthened and enlightened thereby. 
Many rough places were smoothed, many dark spots enlight- 
ened. 

In it he saw the highest proof of God's wonderful wisdom. 
A mind that could conceive, perfect, and put into operation so 
wonderful, so simple and yet effective a natural law, could only 
be divine. 

It is not strange that, with his tastes and feelings, a plot of 
land to cultivate became early a necessity. While not exactly 
" brought up " on a farm, he was brought into intimate relation 
with most forms of farm-labor. The small plot of land around 
his father's house furnished the field for quite a little practical 
farming. For in New England every one was expected to raise 
the greater part of his own vegetables, and the boys, as soon as 
they were big enough to run around, were expected to contribute 
their little quota towards the common good. 

It was not until he was settled in Indianapolis that Mr. 
Beecher owned a plot of his own large enough for flowers, fruit, 
and vegetables. There he worked daily, finding rest from his 
head-work, fresh air, and healthful exercise, which would alone 
have more than repaid him for all expense or trouble. Rising 
before five in the summer, he was out in his garden when most 
of his neighbors were enjoying the sweet unconsciousness of 
their morning naps. Aside from the big dividend of increased 
health and vigor, he was further rewarded by unusual success in 
raising small fruits and flowers. His roses were a revelation to 
the community, and lent their fragrance to many an humble 
home or sick-room. For fruit and flowers did pastoral duty, 
cheering the sick, brightening the dark side of life in many a 
poverty-cramped family ; while the impulse along the line of 
taste and love for the beautiful, and the feeling of the dignity of 
honest labor, which he gave to the whole community, we are told 
is still felt, and will long be remembered as a souvenir of his 
pastorate in Indianapolis. 

His contributions to the theory of gardening and farming in 
the Indiana Farmer and Gardener we have already referred to 
in an earlier chapter. 

During the first few years of his Brooklyn pastorate he does 



6l8 BIOGRAPHY OF 

not seem to have had the time to look about for any place in 
which to practise his favorite avocation. 

Of course the crowded condition of city life precluded the 
possibility of having either farm or garden near his home. He 
was accustomed then to visit among friends a part of the time,, 
spending the bulk of the summer in some picturesque place. 

The earliest bit of country that lies within our memory was 
Salisbury, in Connecticut, where Mr. Beecher spent the summers 
of 1852 and 1853. 

We remember well how, with the semi-savagery of early boy- 
hood, we, with our misguided playmates, lay in wait for some 
frisky guinea-pigs, playing harmlessly in their little pen, and, 
after capturing a number, transported them to an upper veranda, 
and, in imitation of the ancient heathen's treatment of captives, 
dashed them upon the stones below ; and how retribution, in the 
form of a very indignant father, seized upon our youthful per- 
son, and, with the dexterity born of some little practice, gave us 
a long- abiding illustration of how dreadful a thing was cruelty. 
There also we obtained our first practical insight into a hornet's 
disposition and activity. 

Salisbury, doubtless, was a lovely spot, but its memories to us 
are not cheering, and we pass on. 

In 1853 Mr. Beecher purchased his first farm in the East, 
a plot of ninety-six acres, situated in the. town of Lenox, up 
among the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts. This was known 
as the " Blossom Farm." It was justly celebrated for its fine 
fruit, especially apples. But it did not altogether suit Mr. 
Beecher, nor tempt him into any great agricultural outlay. It 
was too far from the city. He could not run up for a day, and 
back again. He could not be there in spring and seed time, owing 
to his pastoral duties. Six weeks' vacation time in midsummer, 
with an occasional visit of two or three days, was about the limit 
of his time there. He had to run the farm by proxy, which was 
about as enjoyable, to him, as employing some one to eat his 
meals. 

Having a chance, in 1857, to sell the place, he did so, and 
then hired another farm at Matteawan, just back of Fishkill 
Landing, on the Hudson River. This promised to be a more 
satisfactory place ; but a little over two hours from New York, 
he could run up and back the same day, and spend many a half- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 



619 



day at work in his garden, from which he was debarred by dis- 
tance at Lenox. This, doubtless, would have been his country- 
place, had not some happy chance led him a little further down 
the river, to Peekskill-on-the-Hudson, just at the entrance to 
the Highlands. There he found his ideal summer home, on 
the east side of the river, facing the sunset, but about forty miles 
from New York ; the land rising by a succession of easy hills, 
terrace-like, six hundred feet above the river level, until one 




The Cottage at Peekskill, 

reached the farm a little over a mile and a half from the 
depot. Although when he first saw it the place was rough, 
but little cultivated, with gnarled and half-dead apple-trees scat- 
tered here and there over it, yet the possibilities were such that 
on the first inspection he decided to buy. So it came about 
that in the fall of 1859 he gave up his Matteawan place and 
bought the hillside at Peekskill, which he named " Boscobel." 

At the foot of his lawn the turnpike runs along a level 
stretch for nearly a quarter of a mile ; from the road the land rises 



620 BIOGRAPHY OF 

on the north by a gradual, easy grade in graceful lines up to a 
comparatively level plateau, on which the cottage and the old 
barns were located, in true old-fashioned style, in happy disregard 
of either convenience or scenic effect. Taking a fresh start, the 
grade rose upward again for three or four hundred yards, forming 
a third level space on top, and then plunged steeply down into the 
valley of Peeks-kill. From the turnpike the private approach ran 
up between a double row of stately maples to the very doorstep. 
This hill was one of the spurs that ran back from the river at 
right angles to its course — a detached foot-hill of the Highlands. 

With the exception of a few acres on the crest of the hill, the 
farm lay along the south slope, sheltered by its own crest from 
the north winds, its face to the southern sun. In this Mr. 
Beecher saw peculiar advantages for early fruit and vegetables, 
while the view in every direction delighted his eye. From the- 
house, looking west, lay the river, visible only for a mile or so, 
and lying like a beautiful Swiss lake encircled by protecting 
mountains. To the south and southeast the landscape was 
varied and charming — low hills, woodland and green fields, mak- 
ing up a beautiful picture. Whilst from the hill- top, reputed to- 
be the highest point in Westchester County, the country lay out 
like one great panorama on all sides, the view to the north 
and west being especially grand ; another glimpse of the Hud- 
son being visible just before it is swallowed up by the grim 
mountains of the Highlands. Over all in the distance rise, blue 
and faint, the Catskills, whilst to the east the country rolls in 
graceful, broken stretches for miles. 

Such were the general features of the farm when Mr. Beecher 
bought it. 

The house was a low, two-story, wooden farm-house of pre- 
Revolutionary origin, where, as the legend goes, that sturdy old 
warrior, Israel Putnam, had his headquarters at one time — a 
legend strongly corroborated by the silent testimony of cannon- 
balls, bayonets, and various military trappings from time to time 
unearthed by the inquisitive and grubbing plough. In the spring 
of i860 Mr. Beecher took possession of his new farm of thirty- 
six acres, and began at once the work of reformation and im- 
provement. 

At first the low, scrubby bushes that, under the pretence of 
bearing edible fruit, had long been allowed to outlive their use- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



621 



fulness, were grubbed up and made into fagots for kindling. 
Then one by one the trees in the ancient apple-orchard, which 
Putnam's patriots had, doubtless, many a time assaulted and car- 
ried by storm well-nigh a hundred years before, and which in 
turn took a sharp and colicky revenge upon their assailants — unless 
the quality of their fruit had greatly deteriorated in modern 
times — yielded to the axe, and in the generous open fireplace, the 
glory of the old-fashioned farm-house, paid their last tribute to 
their master, man. 




The Old Apple-Tree. 

The last to fall a victim to axe and fire, and then only when 
extreme old age and decay had ended its apple-bearing life, and 
made it a standing menace of danger to all who passed under 
its rotted branches, was one entitled to special notice. Mr. 
Beech er wrote of it : 

" I have a tree on my place at Peekskill that cannot be less 
than two hundred years old. Two ladies, one about eighty years 
old, called upon us several years ago, saying that they had been 



62 2 BIOGRAPHY OF 

brought up on the farm, and inquiring if the old apple-tree yet 
lived. They said that in their childhood it was called ' the old 
apple-tree,' and was then a patriarch. It must now be a Methu- 
selah, and is probably the largest recorded apple-tree in the 
world. I read in no work of any apple-tree whose circumference 
exceeds twelve or thirteen feet. This morning I measured the 
Peekskill apple-tree, and found that, at four feet from the ground, 
where the limbs begin to spring, it was fourteen feet and ten 
inches in circumference, and at six feet from the ground fourteen 
feet and six inches. I am sorry to add that the long-suffering 
old tree gives unmistakable signs of yielding to the infirmities of 
old age." Where the enormous limbs branched out, so great was 
the space, a summer-house was built, in which the children play- 
ed keeping house. 

Then the old ramshackle barns were taken in hand, with 
their successive additions hitched on, as more space might be 
required — architectural after-thoughts, regardless of everything 
except capacity. Some were torn down, others removed to more 
convenient and less obtrusive localities — the smaller buildings 
doing duty for carriages and chickens ; the larger ones, with a 
little ingenuity and the aid of a carpenter or two, being consoli- 
dated into one commodious building. 

Of course this was the work of several years, and required no 
little planning and arranging, furnishing that restful change of 
occupation, from the continuous and intense mental strain, which 
Mr. Beecher so much needed. 

The surface cleared, then began the more serious work of 
subsoiling, draining, and clearing up of stones. Every inch of 
the thirty-six acres, save only where trees and buildings stood, 
was turned over to the subsoil. The deep subsoil plough, with 
four sturdy oxen to give it force, drove its steel nose twenty 
inches down into the earth, taking different parts of the farm in 
successive seasons, each then being seeded down to grass, grain, 
or vegetables, as the case might be. The loose stones, having first 
been carefully gathered from the upturned surface, were then 
utilized in laying gutters by the roadside, in building founda- 
tions for barns, sheds, etc., or in making drains — for he 
found that the live springs that filled the hillside, unless 
regulated, might make his lawn too damp. So deep drains were 
sunk across the lower half of the hill in different directions, which 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 623 

carried off the surplus moisture ; while under house, barn, and 
cattle-sheds wells were sunk from eight to ten feet, furnishing a 
supply of cool, sparkling water, never failing in the dryest sum- 
mer. With these later improvements began his real gardening 
and farming; every form of flower, fruit, and vegetable that the 
latitude would permit was planted and raised. Pears, apples, 
and grapes, among the fruit, might be said to have been his 
specialty ; between two and three thousand trees and vines 
were planted, carefully watched, trimmed, and pruned year by 
year until they came into full bearing, while the smaller fruit, 
vines, and bushes became well-nigh innumerable. Though he 
kept the place always well stocked with what might be called 
the standard crops, he was very fond of taking up, for a year 
or two, several specialties, devoting his principal attention and 
study to these until he had pretty thoroughly mastered their 
habits, peculiarities, and capacities, then for the next year or two 
take up something else, and so on, gradually in time making a 
special study of every flower, fruit, and vegetable that could be 
grown in that latitude. 

When strawberries were in hand he tried every variety, early 
and late, large and small, sweet and tart, and in such numbers 
that several hundred quarts were often picked in one day. The 
same was true of pears, apples, plums, peaches, cherries, grapes, 
raspberries, blackberries, as well as peas, corn, potatoes, cab- 
bages, etc. 

After one class of fruit or vegetable had had its turn, it was 
not neglected, but one or two of the varieties found best adapted 
to the locality were retained (except in the large fruit-trees, of 
which a large assortment was always kept), and only sufficient 
planted to supply the family with about four times as much as 
could possibly be used ; for, unless there was enough of every- 
thing, so that each person in the family at the time might, if so 
inclined, make a meal of any one thing, he would not touch it. 
" Skimpy messes," as he used to call them, were his utter abom- 
ination. But the thing that gave him the greatest pleasure was 
to beat his neighbors in early crops. Across the turnpike, at the 
foot of the lane, for many years lived a very dear friend, Mr. 
George Dayton, a gentleman of means, well skilled in every phase 
of scientific farming ; and between the two was carried on, so 
long as Mr. Dayton lived, a most earnest rivalry on the subject 



624 BIOGRAPHY OF 

of farming. Nothing delighted Mr. Beecher more than to gather 
a basket of peas, a large dish of strawberries, or a dozen ears of 
corn, the first of the season, that had ripened just a day or two 
ahead of Mr. Dayton's, and bringing them down to his friend's, 
deliver them to him, as, with an air of mock sympathy, he con- 
doled with him over his inability to raise early vegetables or 
fruit ; then, with a hearty laugh, invite him up on to the hillside 
to learn how a farm should be run. The natural advantages of 
his location, sheltered from the north and open to the first warm 
breezes from the south, generally gave him these pleasant triumphs 
by two or three days ; though once in a while the tables would be 
turned, and he had to take his turn at being bantered and re- 
ceiving his friend's so-called charity. 

We confess we used to prefer these infrequent reverses, for 
our youthful eyes watched regretfully the dishful of great, 
luscious strawberries going in triumphal procession to Mr. Day- 
ton's. We used to think that the first fruits, like charity, should 
be tried at home, and had to find such guilty consolation as we 
could in a surreptitious visit to the strawberry-bed. This was 
not altogether satisfactory, for aside from the attendant risks, 
the remaining berries would only be half-ripe. 

At the same time he bought the place it was his good fortune 
to meet an English gardener, Mr. Thomas J. Turner, and to se- 
cure his services as superintendent, or "boss," as he was known 
to the men — one of those simple-minded, faithful, hard-working 
men, who never spared himself, nor his subordinates. His de- 
voted attachment to the family and the place — " Our farm" he 
used to call it — made him an invaluable helper. 

For flowers and ornamental shrubs Turner had at first but 
little taste; his great ambition was to make the farm "pay," 
and the contest for supremacy between master and man caused 
much amusement to all parties. 

Turner was always trying to extend the borders of his pea 
and potato patches, encroaching on the hollyhocks and dahlias, 
while Mr. Beecher would crowd the corn and lima beans to make 
more room for roses and pinks. 

How Mr. Beecher outwitted his opponent we will let him 
narrate : 

" I am as set and determined to have flowers as my farmer, 
Mr. Turner, is to have vegetables ; and there is a friendly quarrel 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 



62 5 



in hand all the season, a kind of border warfare, between flowers 
and vegetables — which shall have this spot, and which shall secure 
that nook ; whether in this southern slope it shall be onions or 
gladioluses ; whether a row of lettuce shall edge that patch, or of 
asters. I think, on a calm review, that I have rather gained on 
Mr. Turner. The fact is, I found that he had me at a disad- 
vantage, being always on the place and having the whole spring 
to himself. So I shrewdly tampered with the man himself, and 




Mr. Beecher on His Farm. 



before he knew what he was about, I had infected him with the 
flower mania (and this is a malady that I have never known 
•cured), so that I had an ally in the very enemy's camp. Indeed, 
I begin to fear that my manager will get ahead of me yet in skill 
and love of flowers ! " 

In the years when corn, cabbage, or potatoes were being spe- 
cialized Turner was happy. With a proud and beaming face he 
would drive down to the local market, load after load of choice 



626 BIOGRAPHY OF 

vegetables. His cup of happiness would overflow when he re- 
turned and announced that " our vegetables " brought the best 
price of any in the market. 

But, alas ! like many a man before him, his pride became, 
figuratively speaking, his ruin ; for after a while the fact was dis- 
covered that Turner was selecting the largest and fairest for the 
market, and that the home table had to be content with second 
and third rates, too poor to sell with credit. That ended all 
further farming for profit. From that time on nothing further 
was raised for the market. 

As full of interest as every process connected with farming 
and fruit culture was, Mr. Beecher's greatest pleasure was in the 
cultivation of flowers and ornamental shrubs. Their ever-vary- 
ing form, their delicate perfume, and, above all, their abounding 
wealth of color, furnished him a bouquet of which he never tired. 
Roses were perhaps his standard favorites, and, whatever other 
specialty he might be studying, they were kept up always. Of 
these he wrote : 

" All rosedom is out in holiday attire, and roses white and 
black, green and pink, scarlet, crimson, and yellow, striped and 
mottled, double and single, in clusters and solitary, moss-roses, 
damask roses, Noisette, Perpetual, Bourbon, China, tea, musk, 
and all other tribes and names, hang in exuberant beauty. The 
air is full of their fragrance. The eye can turn nowhere that it 
is not attracted to a glowing bush of roses. What would not 
people shut up in cities give to see such luxuriance of beauty ! 
. . . The wonder is that every other man is not an enthusiast, 
and in the month of June a gentle fanatic. Floral insanity is one 
of the most charming inflictions to which man is heir. The garden 
is infectious. Flowers are ' catching,' or the love of them is. 
Men begin with one or two. In a few years they are struck 
through with floral zeal. And one finds, after the heat, and strife,, 
and toil of his ambitious life, that there is more pure satisfaction 
in his garden than in all the other pursuits that promise so much 
of pleasure and yield so little." 

In different years he tested every variety of form and color 
which could be found in the single and double hollyhocks, single 
and double dahlias, phlox, geraniums, pansies, lilies, fuchsias, and 
chrysanthemum, sometimes massed in great banks of color, 
sometimes scattered in different beds and along borders, or in 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 62 J 

little beds hidden amid the shrubbery. From early May till frost 
came, " Boscobel " was always ablaze with the glories of flowers 
in their different seasons. 

It is given to few to understand, and fewer still to experience, 
the w r onderful effect which flowers had upon him. Fagged with 
hard work, vexed with cares, with nerves strained and irritated, 
a few hours among his flowers rested his brain, soothed his 
nerves, 'and refitted him for days of hard work. Doubtless 
change of occupation, open air, and the slight physical exertion 
required in tending his pets, did something towards rest and re- 
creation ; but there was a subtle power in many colors that 
worked upon his nerves in a strangely mysterious way, that 
gave him more relief from nerve excitement in an hour than 
any drug ever compounded. Flowers and colored gems — which 
he called unfading flowers — possessed this soothing power above 
everything else. 

In his younger days his farming and gardening experiences 
were intimately associated with hard physical work. But after he 
had settled at "Boscobel" the number and pressure of his regular 
engagements made farm labor, except by proxy, impossible. He 
worked some, it is true, but principally for exercise ; the real 
use and benefit of the farm being its sweet and soothing restful- 
ness. 

His description of his " work " and the unalloyed pleasure he 
found in " farming " needs no enlarging : 

" The light is just coming. I do not care for that, as I do not 
propose to get up at such an hour. But the birds do care. They 
evidently wind up their singing apparatus over-night, for when 
the first bird breaks the silence, in an instant the rest go off as if 
a spring had been touched which moved them all. There are 
robins without count, wood-thrushes, orioles, sparrows, bobolinks, 
meadow-larks, bluebirds, yellowbirds, wrens, warblers, catbirds 
(as the Northern mocking-bird is called), martins, twittering swal- 
lows. Think of the noise made by mixing all these bird-notes 
together ; add a rooster and a solemn old crow to carry the base ; 
then consider that of each kind there are scores, and of some 
hundreds, within ear-reach, and you will have some faint concep- 
tion of the opening chant of the day. You may not think that I 
wake so early, but I do; or, having awakened, I again go to sleep,, 
but I solemnly do. I don't think of getting up before six. 



628 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" After breakfast there are so many things to be done first 
that I neglect them all. The morning is so fine, the young leaves 
are so beautiful, the bloom on the orchard is so gorgeous, the 
sounds and sights are so many and so winning, that I am apt to 
sit down on the veranda for just a moment, and for just another, 
and for a series of them, until an hour goes by. Do not blame 
me ! Do not laugh at such farming and such a farmer. 

" The soil overhead bears larger and better crops, for a sen- 
sible man, than does the soil under-feet. There are blossoms in 
the clouds. There is fruit upon invisible trees, to those who 
know how to pluck it. 

" But then sky-gazing and this dallying with the landscape 
will not do. What crowds of things require the eye and hand ! 
Flowers must be transplanted. Flower-seeds must be sown ; 
shrubs and trees pruned ; vines looked after ; a walk taken over 
the hill to see after some evergreens, with many pauses to gaze 
upon the landscape, and many birds watched as they are confi- 
dentially exhibiting their domestic traits before you. The kit- 
tens, too, at the barn must be visited, the calf, and the new cow. 
Then every gardener knows how much time is consumed in 
watching the new plants. For instance, I have eight new kinds 
of strawberries that need looking after, each one purporting to 
be a world's wonder. I am quite anxious about eight or ten new 
kinds of clematis, two new species of honeysuckle, eight or ten 
new and rare evergreens, and ever so many other things, shrubs 
and flowers. 

'* But what shall I say of the new peas, new beans, rare cu- 
cumbers, early melons, extraordinary potatoes ? Do you not see 
that it is impossible for me, amid such incessant and weighty 
cares, to write? The air is white with apple-blossoms ; the trees 
are all singing; the steaming ground beseeches me to grant it a 
portion of flower-seeds ; by night the whippoorwill, and by day 
the wood-thrush and morking-bird, fill my imagination with all 
sorts of fancies, and how can I write ?" 

After a number of years Mr. Beecher began to think that he 
would like to build a house that should embody his ideal of 
what a home should be — a real homestead whose' hospitable 
largeness could readily accommodate all the children and the 
children's children, and which in design, in finish and decoration, 
should be an education for his children. Several years were 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 629 

spent in talking over plans and examining designs proposed by 
architects before the final plan was adopted. Then the Tilton 
conspiracy broke out, and for a short time deferred the proposed 
building. But the need of some diverting occupation, something 
that should change the entire current of his thoughts, became 
so decided that in self-defence he began building the new house. 
On that peaceful hillside, amid the busy workmen, he found a 
grateful asylum and refuge from the tempest with which his 
enemies had sought to destroy him. 

It has never been doubted in his family, that the relief which 
he found in the pure air, the beautiful scenery, the sweet com- 
munion with flowers and birds, at Peekskill, with his engrossing 
interest in "the house," saved his life during those years when 
the burden was the heaviest. 

He has often said that he never spent money more profitably 
than in building his new house and in laying out his grounds. 

Stone by stone and brick by brick he watched the foundations 
and the lower stories rise. Each floor-beam, joist, and girder 
received his zealous scrutiny. The reasons for this, and the 
causes for that, he must know all about ; until, long before the 
house was finished, he was, barring the manual dexterity, as good 
a mason or carpenter as the best of those at work. Every day, 
and often a dozen times a day, he climbed from cellar to ridge- 
pole, studying, investigating, making suggestions, or proposing 
alterations — these latter the terror of his architect ; for, though 
often decided improvements on the first plans, they sometimes 
involved a serious modification of the work in hand. Every gen- 
tleman who visited him must make the tour clear to the ridge- 
pole, for there the view was finest. Once, when a young man was 
his visitor and victim, he insisted that they should mount the 
lofty but unfinished chimney to get a little more extended out- 
look, setting the example himself ; but his companion, who was 
hugging a firmly-secured cross-tie, in momentary fear of losing 
his balance and falling, declared that he drew the line at the 
chimney, and would aspire no higher. 

When finally the house was up came the internal finishing 
and decoration. Nothing was omitted that, in his opinion, would 
increase comfort or convenience ; while, in the decorative and 
ornamental finish, he aimed at results which should educate the 
eye and tastes of his children. 



63O REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 

" Boscobel " was to be the family home, and ultimately his- 
permanent residence, for then he used to say that when he 
reached seventy, he proposed to retire from the public and de- 
vote his closing years to literary work. 

Here children and grandchildren were together each sum- 
mer, pilgrims to this domestic Mecca. The house must be 
large enough to hold them all, and friends besides, without 
crowding ; and it was, twenty and twenty-five being no unusual 
number gathered within its walls. And on one occasion, 
when a clerical union was invited to meet at " Boscobel," thirty 
were, with a little ingenious packing, entertained over-night. 

It was not until the summer of 1878 that the workmen were 
finally dispossessed and the family entered into the new house. 
What a sense of expansion we all experienced ! We looked back 
upon the humble little cottage, hallowed by so many years full of 
enjoyment, and wondered how it could ever have held us all — 
something as a butterfly, with broad, expanded wings, might con- 
template its empty chrysalis, surprised that it had lived so long, 
cramped within so small a compass. 

The richness of the wall-paper and the delicacy of the fresco- 
ing would not permit the hanging of pictures, while Mr. Beech- 
er's love of the beautiful would not permit him to rest quiet 
until he had found some way of further decoration appropriate 
to his walls. This led him to the study of the various ornamen- 
tal ceramics. China, Japan, England and France, Germany and 
America, were each laid under contribution for its characteristic 
productions. Fortunately he had made his mantel-pieces broad 
and high, with many little shelves and brackets, convenient rest- 
ing-places for vases, cups, and bowls. Once the house was com- 
plete came the final work of improvement — the landscape, grad- 
ing, planting ornamental shrubs, and laying out of his lawn, whose 
ten acres spread out before the new house. The trimming of 
trees and shrubs into fantastic or mathematical figures, and strict 
regularity of path and plot, he detested. Landscape-gardening 
should be only an assistant to nature, not a remodeller. 

On this theory he laid out his place. In the changing of 
grades, grouping of shrubs, planting of tangled copses, he sought 
to give to everything the appearance of natural growth and for- 
mation. 

Having taken up ornamental trees and plants, with his usual 




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3 

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632 REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

thoroughness he exhausted the subject. Every tree and shrub 
that with reasonable care could be made to grow on that favored 
place was planted. And so skilfully and naturally have they 
been grouped that, though there are over sixteen hundred of the 
ornamental varieties growing within the limits of those thirty- six 
acres, they are not crowded, and nearly twenty acres are free for 
grass, vegetables, and fruit. 

It was stated by an experienced landscape-gardener, in 1884, 
that, with the exception of the Smithsonian Institute in Wash- 
ington, no collection similar in extent and variety could then be 
found in America. 

Of course this building, improving, and planting called for a 
constant and heavy outlay of money. It was in part to meet this 
that he projected and carried out the series of lecture-tours that 
ran through the last ten years of his life. 

In the commercial sense of the word his farming was not 
profitable. He spent upon his place many thousands of dollars 
that never came back to him in coin or currency. His receipts 
were of the kind not to be found in the open market, not affect- 
ed by the flurries in " The Street " ; neither defaulting cashier nor 
stock-jobbing speculator could depreciate or lessen them. 

If money be valued at the amount of comfort and happiness it 
affords, then the thousands lavished on his beloved home were 
well spent, for seldom has the same amount given so much of 
real, healthful happiness, and to so many. 

None outside of the family will ever know to how many 
" Boscobel " was a veritable tower of refuge in dark days and 
troublous times ; how many found inspiration there for greater 
work, and increased courage for burden-bearing ; whilst to Mr. 
Beecher it was an investment that repaid him, in dividends ot 
life-lengthening rest, reinvigoration, and happiness, many hun- 
dred per cent. No wonder that he loved every spear of grass, 
every budding leaf and perfumed flower, upon that hillside. 
They were his children, at least by adoption. No wonder that 
the birds, and even the very insects, his uninvited summer guests, 
were dear to him ; and that each fall, as he turned his back upon 
the summer and the hillside, to enter again into the harassing 
turmoils of city life, his thoughts ran back in gratitude to the 
many friends that had contributed so much to his happiness : 
" Neither can a sensitive nature forget his summer com- 




633 



634 BIOGRAPHY OF 

panions, or stint them in their meed of praise and gratitude. 
Worms whose metamorphosis we have watched ; spiders whose 
webs glitter along the grass at morning and at evening, or mark 
out geometric figures among the trees — spiders red, brown, 
black, green, gray, yellow, and speckled ; soft-winged moths ; 
gorgeous butterflies, steel-colored and shining black crickets, 
locusts and grasshoppers, and all the rabble of creaking, sing- 
ing, fiddling fellows besides, which swarm in air and earth — we 
bid you all a hearty good-by. Sooth to say, we part from some 
of you without regret. But for the million we feel a true yearn- 
ing, so much have we watched your ways, so many hours has 
our soul been fed by you through our eyes. Ye are a part of 
the great Father's family. 

" Oh ! how goodly a book is that which God has opened in 
this world ! Every day is a separate leaf — nay, not leaf, but 
volume, with text, and note, and picture, with every dainty quip 
and quirk of graceful art, with stores of knowledge illimitable, 
if one will only humble himself to receive it ! One should not 
willingly be ungrateful, even to the smallest creatures or to in- 
animate objects that have served his pleasure. 

" And so, to reed and grass, bush and tree, stone and hill, 
brook and lake, all creeping things and all things that fly, to 
early birds and late-chirping locusts, we wave our hand in grate- 
ful thanks ! 

" But to that Providence over all, source of their joy and 
mine, what words can express what every manly heart must feel ? 

" Only the life itself can give thanks for life." 

While house, flowers, and plants occupied the greater part of 
his farming time, they by no means monopolized it. He took a 
very deep interest in his chickens. White Leghorns, Buff Co- 
chins, and Brown Brahmas, out of the many kinds that he tried, 
were the final favorites, and repaid him well in eggs — the univer- 
sal hen currency — for his pains and care. Of these he wrote : 

" It is a day for the country ; the city palls on the jaded nerve. 
I long to hear the hens cackle. There are lively times now in 
barn and barn-yard, I'll warrant you. . . . The Leghorn, of true 
blood, leads the race of fowls for continuous eggs, in season and 
out of season — eggs large enough, of fine quality, and sprung from 
hens that never think of chickens. For a true Leghorn seldom 
wants to sit. They believe in division of labor. If they provide 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 635 

the eggs, others must hatch them. . . . The Brahmas and Co- 
chins have good qualities. They are large, even huge. They are 
peaceable. And the Cochins do not scratcli — an important fact to 
all who have gardens. . . . But a more ungainly thing than Buff 
Cochins the eye never saw. A flock of Leghorns is a delight to 
the eye ; their forms are symmetrical, and every motion graceful. 
But the fat, podgy Cochins waddle before you like over-fat 
buffoons. They are grotesque, good-natured, clumsy, useful 
creatures, with a great love of sitting. We keep Cochin hens to 
sit on Leghorn eggs." 

So long as he raised chickens in the good old-fashioned, or- 
thodox way he was very successful ; but when, one unlucky day, 
he fell into the hands of the agent of some patent chicken-breed- 
ing process, his sorrows began. 

The hatcher and brooder appeared in due time, with trays, 
tin pans, heater, self-regulating thermometer and enough other 
paraphernalia to hatch out an ostrich. Three hundred selected 
eggs were taken for the first experiment, carefully stowed in the 
trays, the heat turned on, the regulating thermometer put in gear ; 
then we all stood back and gazed in wondering admiration upon 
the machine which was to grind out chickens like a mill. Our 
impatience could hardly be restrained to await the eventful day 
when the shells should crack, and the downy occupants come 
tumbling out of the trays ; while visions of tender broiled 
chickens, chickens roasted, stewed, and fricasseed without limit, 
danced through our exultant minds. Three hundred spring 
chickens ! Phew ! And the process could be repeated indefi- 
nitely. 

At last the long-expected day arrived when, according to the 
regulations, all well-behaved eggs should hatch. 

Moris laboravit et — no, not a mouse, but one solitary little 
chicken came forth. Two hundred and ninety-nine good eggs 
had gone wrong ! 

The second trial resulted better : one in every ten responded 
at the roll-call. But even these found this cold world uncon- 
genial, and, what with the pips, gapes, and other maladies inci- 
dent to chicken babyhood, their little band rapidly diminished 
to zero. But these discouragements only stimulated Mr. Beecher 
to greater effort, determined that, if the machine could be made 
to work, he would make it. It would be hard to say what the 



636 BIOGRAPHY OF 

upshot might have been, had not the machine, one fine night, 
started off on an original plan of its own, with a view to forcing 
the eggs, which resulted in burning the hatcher, chicken-house, 
part of a barn, and nearly cleaning out the entire general estab- 
lishment. After that the hens had a monopoly of the hatching 
business. 

With his cattle he was uniformly successful, no one having 
invented any calf-hatching machine. For many years he raised 
nothing but Ayrshires — very handsome cows and very generous 
milkers — but finally he began to try the Jerseys, and never after 
changed from them. Their beautiful deer-like heads, small, grace- 
ful limbs, and kindly dispositions made them universal favorites ; 
while their milk, scant in quantity but wonderfully rich in 
cream, made berry-time a marked season of the year. As he 
never cared to keep more than six or eight cows, he had each 
year to sell several heifers ; these, thanks to the kindness of Mr. 
Kittredge, his next-door neighbor, having been registered in the 
Jersey stock-book, sold for large prices. 

No farm so well stocked with flowers should be without its 
bees ; so about eight years ago he purchased four hives of 
Italian bees, had a proper shed erected, and the bees duly in- 
stalled. 

After a few preliminary experiments he delegated the care 
and culture of bees to our hands. The necessity of appearing 
in his pulpit at regular stated times, with a face reasonably free 
from distortion, compelled him to forego the pleasure and exer- 
cise of caring for and dodging bees. But if he found it prudent 
to turn the bees over to others, he none the less enjoyed watch- 
ing his proxy, making humorous suggestions — from a convenient 
distance. Though he did not himself handle them, he kept 
himself fully posted respecting their habits. All that the text- 
books could teach he learned, and then would question us as to 
our actual experience. Whenever a hive swarmed he was on 
hand, if at the farm, and none were more interested in capturing 
the swarm than he. 

As we have intimated, his bees sometimes showed a want of 
respect for " the cloth," and an inappreciation of his friendly in- 
terest. At these times he joined as heartily as the less interested 
spectators in the laugh raised at his expense ; for there seems to 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 637 

be something irresistibly comical in the sight of a full-grown man 
waging a hopeless war with a mere mite of a bee. His relish for 
the humorous could not be stayed even by the smart of a bee's 
sting, while a little patience was sure to afford him a chance to 
return the laugh with interest. 

On one occasion an enormous swarm had settled on the lower 
limbs of a cherry-tree, just over the place where an unconscious 
calf was tethered and peacefully browsed. By some strange 
freak the swarm dropped from the limb upon the unsuspecting 
calf. Fortunately, while swarming, bees are not apt to be ag- 
gressive. The calf, terrified at this crawling mass so suddenly 
enveloping it, began to bleat and rush frantically around as far 
as its chain would permit. The bees, at last annoyed at the shak- 
ing up they received, began to remonstrate in a very pointed 
manner. Matters w r ere momentarily growing more and more seri- 
ous for the calf, when one of the farm-hands, happening by, rushed 
in, with more zeal than discretion, trying to free the calf ; before 
he could unfasten the chain the calf succeeded in entangling 
him, finally tripping him up and falling with him to the ground, a 
confused mass of calf, bees, and Irishman. Fortunately another 
man ran in, and, pulling up the spike to which the chain was fas- 
tened, released them all. Happily no one was seriously hurt, but 
the final rescuer, with face and hands still smarting, meeting Mr. 
Beecher, burst out, in somewhat incoherent excitement : " Those 
domded bees have murthered the calf, an' Kelly's kilt and gone 
to h the other way." 

Mr. Beecher was never able to get any satisfactory explana- 
tion as to what the " other way " was. 

Between the Jerseys and the bees, Boscobel soon became a 
land veritably flowing with milk and honey. 

No account of the Peekskill home would be complete without 
some mention of the dogs. Like all true lovers of nature, Mr. 
Beecher was very fond of dogs, and generally had a fairly large 
family on hand. 

From Bruno and Jack, two canine giants — one a St. Bernard 
and the other half Russian bloodhound and half mastiff — to the 
little, wiggling mite of a diminutive black-and-tan, all bark and 
wiggle, through all the intervening grades of size and kind — mas- 
tiff, colly, Esquimaux, and terrier — one thing only was insisted 



638 REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 

upon invariably : the dog must be kind and gentle to children. 
He might be ever so homely, ever so useless, and he would be 
petted and loved ; but if he once snapped at the little ones who 
tumbled over him, pulling tail and ears, the fiat went forth, as 
irrevocable as the laws of the Medes and Persians — banishment 
or d^ath. He loved to watch them frolicking among themselves 
or with the children, chasing and being chased. With them he 
would take long walks, and often sit upon the bank and talk to 
the companion who, with ears pricked up and wagging tail, 
seemed almost to understand him. Of one he once wrote : 

" I have a four-legged heathen on my place — ' Tommy.' He 
is a most intelligent and a most discriminating little dog ; he is a 
gentleman in disguise, and I am really sorry for him that he 
cannot talk. If ever there was a dog that was distressed to think 
that he could not talk, that dog is. I sit by him on the bank, of 
a summer evening, and I say, ' Tommy, I am sorry for you ' ; 
and he whines, as much as to say, ' So am I.' I say, ' Tommy, I 
should like to tell you a great many things that you are worthy 
of knowing' ; and I do not know which is the most puzzled, he 
or I — I to get any idea into his head, or he to get any out of 
mine ; but there it is : I know what he thinks, and he knows not 
what I think. He knows that there is something above a dog, 
and he manifests his canine uneasiness by whining, and in other 
wjys. His aspiration shows itself from his ears to his tail. He 
longs to be something more and better ; he yearns to occupy a 
larger sphere ; but, after all, he does not, and he cannot." 

To the children " Boscobel " was a beautiful home, filled with 
everything that could educate the eye and taste, and cultivate 
the love of the beautiful in nature ; made doubly dear by the 
daily association with our father in his happiest and brightest 
moods. 

To the friends for whom its doors were ever open it was a 
delightful, to its owner a veritable haven of rest. 

From its commanding height he looked out upon the country 
lying below and beyond, with, the eye of ownership ; for he used 
to say : " I own air I can see. I enjoy all that there is of beauty 
and peacefulness in my neighbor's lands as much as they, without 
the responsibility or the taxes." This, he declared, was the most 
profitable kind of land-owning. 



CHAPTER XXXI. 

Home Life— Love of Children— His Method of Training and Education- 
Formation of Library and Art Collection — Personal Traits. 

TO the public Mr. Beecher was best known as the eloquent 
preacher and speaker, the fearless advocate of right and 
foe to wrong, the champion of the weak and oppressed, a 
friend to all mankind. But it was only to those who knew him 
in his home-life that the softer and sweeter sides of his nature 
were fully revealed. For his home and family he had the deepest 
and most tender affection. Though brought up in New England, 
where respectful reverence from child to parent was often carried 
to such an extreme that the father was almost unapproachable 
to his children, he retained none of the puritanical austerity 
that largely filled the social atmosphere of Connecticut seventy 
years ago, partly because in his'own home there was more of the 
feeling of fellowship between the father and children, but more 
especially because his intense love for children swept away all 
barriers of cold formality. To his own he was the companion 
and playfellow, the partner in every joy, the comforter in every 
sorrow. Patient in unravelling those mysteries of mind and mat- 
ter that perplex the early life of every healthful child, he never 
answered their childish wonderings with the impatient " don't 
bother me," which too often checks that curiosity which is nature's 
mode of self-education, and which often makes childhood one 
long, continuous "why." 

Every little prattler was his by love's adoption. In more than 
a score of households he was the " Grandpa" par excellence, often 
sadly interfering, we fear, with the rules of government ; for, by 
tacit consent between parents, children, and " Grandpa," he was 
superior to all nursery regulations. His consent, and often co- 
operation, was a warrant of pardon for any and all pranks 'and 
escapades committed thereunder. 

He was always very careful to exercise this power along the 
line of healthy sport, in little pranks that gave amusement to all, 

6 39 



64O BIOGRAPHY OF 

but at the same time leading the boys to be more manly and the 
girls to be more womanly. Many a young man and woman to- 
day looks back upon those bright days of their childhood with 
deep and tender affection, and sees where, in what seemed then 
mere sport and fun, they had caught the inspiration for higher 
and nobler living. 

In this childhood's Utopia things were sometimes strangely 
transposed. Nothing would at first more surprise a stranger, in 
whose memory still lingered pungent recollections of early dis- 
cipline, than to see a troop of children pounce down upon Mr. 
Beecher, clamoring with shouts and laughter for a whipping. 
He remembered that shouts and clamor were constant concomi- 
tants in the execution of domestic penalties in his early days, but 
nothing in his experience recalled laughter in that connection. 

The mystery would soon be explained, when, with mock 
frowns and assumed violence, the children were seized, twirled 
and tumbled into a row along the wall, and ordered to hold out 
each right hand ; one after another each hand was seized and 
several blows administered — with a stick of candy. Of course the 
sticks did not get away. The rods were not spared, and we 
don't think that any of the children were spoiled. 

And the stranger, as with quiet smile he looks upon them, 
wonders, after all, if parents resorted to that kind of whipping 
more, whether the increased feeling of good-fellowship would not 
render the need of the other kind less frequent. 

In the training of his own children he seldom resorted to ac- 
tual physical punishment, and then only when the little culprit 
had been guilty of some especially aggravated offence. But when 
he did resort to the laying on of hands, he entered into it with 
great earnestness. Dishonesty, falsehood, cruelty, and meanness 
of every kind were capital offences. The sinner did not lose his 
head in such cases, but some other parts of his person were so 
actively stimulated, that standing became the most comfortable 
position for a long time thereafter. These little rencounters nat- 
urally produced profound impressions. We were not apt to in- 
vite another by repeating that particular offence. 

We well remember some experiments in natural philosophy, 
conducted by us when about six or seven years old, in which a 
kitten and a tub of water figured prominently, some features of 
which, bordering on the barbarous, we will omit. Just then our 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 64 1 

father came along, and — well, things were generally reversed, in- 
cluding the youthful experimenter. The kitten was fished out, 
and we had it so thoroughly impressed upon our understanding 
that kittens won't swim under water, that we do not remember to 
have experimented any further in that direction. 

After these profoundly impressionable interviews he would 
talk earnestly and lovingly to the culprit, declaring that it hurt him 
more to punish than it did the sinner to be punished — which we 
can well believe now, from our knowledge of his deep and tender 
loving-kindness, and from the similar duties time has brought 
to us. Then it used to seem strongly paradoxical, measuring his 
pain by our still smarting skin we generously thought that 
we would willingly have foregone any benefits derived from the 
experience, and have spared him so much suffering. 

Happily, these graver cases were infrequent. The minor mis- 
demeanors from childhood's restless carelessness were generally 
met with quiet, gentle talks, the mischief fully explained with all 
its whys and wherefores; the little penitent being finally dismissed 
with a kiss, honestly and heartily determined to keep out of 
mischief, and succeeding, by great effort, for an hour or two, until 
he tumbled into something else. With such cases the father's 
patience was infinite. 

As the children grew older he was untiring in his care that 
they should form those habits of body, mind, and morals that 
should make them strong, useful, and moral men and women. 
He stimulated their natural curiosity, but at the same time taught 
them to be self-helpful. If a question were asked that could be 
answered by any book that he had, the questioner was sent for it, 
and told, "Now read that carefully, and tell me what you learn; 
I want to know it, too ; " adding : " Information which you get 
when your attention is fully aroused, and for which you have to 
stop and take some little trouble, you will be pretty sure to re- 
member." 

"Never ask a question," he used to say, "if you can find the 
answer yourself, but never hesitate to ask if you can't find it : re- 
member always you have a tongue in your head." 

His letters to the absentees at school and college were full of 
well-considered advice, and well illustrate what we have referred 

t0! « 

" I am more glad than I can express that you feel so much 



642 BIOGRAPHY OF 

interest in religious meetings, and I hope that God will lead you 
to embrace with your whole soul a religious life. It is the only 
way to perfect honor and to the highest truth and duty. Religion 
is only the highest use and regulation of every faculty. To love 
God and live in true benevolence toward men is the very way to 
make yourself wise, happy, and good. ... In all your own per- 
sonal conduct act upon conscience, and do not try to please your- 
self merely, but to do what is right, and because it is right. Towards 
your companions, in all things, seek to be unselfish, kind in little 
things, studying their good and not your own. . . . One word as 
to reading your Bible. You must not regard the book with super- 
stition, and imagine that you will get good by merely reading it. 
You must remember that it is a very large and widespread book; 
many things will not be of service to you yet. It has something 
in it for every age and all circumstances. . . . Every day try to 
put in practice something that you read in the Bible. Remember 
that being a Christian does not take away anything that is in- 
nocent and joyous, but only adds to them higher and nobler 
joys." 

"My dear : 

" I am glad that you have found a pleasant friend in the 
minister. It seems fit that the son of a minister, whose father's 
father was a minister, should have a liking for ministers. I am 
glad, too, that you are fortunate in having a man who is sensible 
enough to understand that a Christian is not less than a man. 
Whatever it is right for anybody to do, it is right for a Christian 
to do; and what a Christian gentleman may not do, nobody has 
a right to do. Religion regulates our pursuits and pleasures, but 
does not destroy them. . . . 

"You are fifteen years old; that is close upon manhood. I 
have no doubt that you begin to look at times quite seriously 
toward the future. But fidelity to the present is the best preparation 
for the future. Do everything thoroughly. Do not be a superficial 
scholar. Go to the roots of everything you study. 

" As to profanity out of doors, I should not, in ordinary cases, 
meddle much, especially in a way that should seem as though 
you owned the boy, or were responsible for his conduct. No- 
thing is more provoking to a young person than to have people 
assume authority over them in moral things, But in your own 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECIIER. 643 

room it is different; profanity there is an intrusion on your rights, 
and is not to be tolerated. If kind measures will not check it, 
then peremptory ones should. I would say to such a one : 
'You must take your choice, to find some other room or to ob- 
serve the decencies of life here !' . . . Now as to your studies. 
It is not mainly the time employed, but the concentration of mind, 
that induces rapid progress. Mere scholars study without great 
grasp and sharp and quick application of thought. They take two 
hours to do what could better be done in one. In part this 
capacity of rapid comprehension and accurate perception depends 
upon one's native endowments, but it depends even more on habit 
and training. While you seek primarily accuracy, you should 
steadily aim with it to accelerate your process, to see quicker, 
think quicker, decide quicker. But if you study intensely you 
must take much air. Don't be tempted to give up a wholesome 
air-bath, a good walk, or skate, or ride every day. It will pay 
you back over your books, by freshness, elasticity, and clearness 
of mind. I have noticed that lessons which require acuteness and 
memory both, are best gotten by studying them the last thing be- 
fore going to bed, and then taking hold again early in the morning. 
•That which we study just before sleeping seems to come out in 
strong relief the next day, if we renew the impression by going 
over the work again. For difficult tasks, then, take this hint : go 
over just before sleeping, and review in the morning. But, again, 
take care of health ; learning in a broken body is like a sword 
without a handle, like a load in a broken-wheeled cart, like 
artillery with no gun-carriage." 

" But, my dear fellow, there is one thing that will be hard, but 
that is to be the root of all success and enjoyment — viz., the habit 
nf boning down to things which you don't like. In all your after- 
life, your success will depend upon your ability to do things 
which you do not particularly like to do. In other words, duty 
must become your watchword, and not pleasure or liking." 

" I wish, at the beginning of your college course, to say a few 
words which, if you will read over once in a while, may help you. 
You are not in college for the sake of its pleasures, or for form's 
sake, but to have your whole intellectual nature roused up and 
brought into efficient drill. No matter what powers one has by 
nature, he requires thorough drill to know how to use them. It 
is not wise for you to choose a profession, long before you Jiave 



644 BIOGRAPHY OF 

any knowledge of yourself, with such thoroughness as is needful. 
You are not grown yet inwardly. You do not know your own 
powers and adaptations. The business of life is too serious to 
be settled upon before one knows anything about his fitness for 
one or another's course. . . . Bear in mind that life is given you 
not to be trifled with. God will hold you to strict account for 
the use you make of your endowments. 

" You were sent into life to work and be useful, not to frolic 
and enjoy yourself. You are drawing near the time when you 
must begin life for yourself '. My dear boy, your own soul, your 
honor, and your father's name are committed to your keeping. 
Guard them from dishonor. May God have you in his holy 
keeping! " 

" I want to say a word to you about your style. In every en- 
ergetic nature, the style, in its essential spirit, will follow a man's 
disposition. So it is somewhere said that ' style is the man.' 
But while this is true of its spirit, yet its external form may be 
much modified and improved by attention and care. Now, you 
have never apparently made this a matter of thought, and still 
less of study. 

" I am not going to recommend, in addition to your other 
studies, that you should read on style, but only this : that in con- 
versation and in your letters you should begin to consider ease, 
fulness, grace, and scrupulous accuracy. I wish you would get 
from the library a copy of Cowper's letters and read them, and 
some of them many times. See what interest he throws around 
trivial things by an elegant way of narrating them. He draws 
pictures, he puts daily trifles in an artistic light. He is as thor- 
ough and complete in each instance as if it were a great historical 
event, instead of being a rabbit's play, a bird's freak, or a tea- 
table affair. The simplicity of his style, its purity and clearness, 
its accuracy, as clear cut as is the finest cut-glass goblet, are 
worthy of notice and imitation. Now, the first step towards im- 
provement is a consciousness of Its necessity, then an instant at- 
tempt at it. Suppose you make your letters a means of prac- 
tice ; see that nothing is stated in an awkward or slovenly way ; 
leave nothing merely hinted and left for the reader to make out 
as best he can ; and, generally, make it a rule never in letters, nor 
even in the mere sketchy memoranda for the purpose of study, 
nor in your note-book, to do things carelessly. Form the habit of 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 645 

stating things clearly, and in scrupulously accurate and grammati- 
cal language ; you have formed the habit of not letting your lips 
tell falsehoods ; now do not let your pen do so either, nor let it 
tell half-truths, nor grotesque truths, but pure and simple truths, 
as they are. That is good style." 

To a young friend who had much artistic ability, but who was 
discouraged because it was not of the highest grade, he wrote : 

" Your note pained «ne for your sake, as it indicated a bad 
state of ideality. The sense of the beautiful and of the perfect 
was designed to stimulate and not to discourage effort. We are 
not to aim at the highest, but the highest attainable by us. Here, 
however, comes in that pride of which you speak, and which is 
unwise, inartistic, unchristian. 

"Now, the province of art may be said to be to make homely 
things handsome, and good things beautiful. 

" The power or the gift of the artist is not to glorify himself, 
but to make the way of human life smoother to tender feet. 
While, then, high art has an important function, so has decorative 
art. It is the democratic form of art — i.e., the form which allies 
it to Christianity. 

" Washing the feet is not an agreeable but a most necessary 
act. ' If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also 
ought to wash one another 's,' etc. It is the keynote of Christianity 
that one should be willing to serve, not rule. Christ ' emptied 
Himself of reputation,' 'took upon Him the form of a servant.' 

" You are not willing to do things which give pleasure to com- 
mon people. You are not willing to make plain people happy, 
to make common homes more cheerful and beautiful. You do 
not join ideality to benevolence, but to self-adoring pride. If you 
could perform great works, you would be willing to toil, and even 
suffer. Being unable to do that, you are not willing to perform 
the gentler offices of art, the sweetest and most womanly, and 
give hues and colors to those homely implements that every-day 
life needs. 

" If I had your gifts and your calling, I think that every day 
I should send thanks to God that, though I could not do great 
things, I could do that which would cheer daily human life, that 
would cast a ray of beauty along the homely path where the 
poor must walk. 

" It seems to me that your eyes are holden, and that you do 



646 BIOGRAPHY OF 

not see God's angel sent to you, saying, ' Will you not be a 
worker together with God, for all, and for the lowly first ? ' You 
push him away and say, with bitterness, ' Let me help the strong, 
the high, the rich, or let me die.' 

" It is a wicked pride, and you must be born again, and re- 
peatedly, until you can say to your Lord, ' I will follow Thee in 
Thy poverty, in Thy humiliation, and if need be I will die to the 
highest ambition, that I may with my #hole soul work for the 
lowly and in a lowly way ! ' 

" Idealized pride. 

" Idealized conscience. 

" These are your enemies. They stand between you and your 
life's work — between you and Him who died for you. 

" I would never have taken the trouble to write this, if I did 
not love you so much, and did not hope to see you yet one day, 
* clothed and in your right mind, sitting at the feet of Jesus.' " 

It was his idea that home should be a training-school for his 
children, by precept, example, and by object-teaching. Partly 
in gratification of his own love of learning and of the beautiful, 
but more for the training of the family and development of cor- 
rect tastes in all departments of literature and art, he covered 
his walls with paintings, etchings, and engravings ; when wall- 
space gave out, portfolios, drawers, and cabinets were filled 
with the choicest specimens of art that he could find — not with 
the zeal of a collector, who seeks the rare merely for its rarity, 
but because the thing itself was beautiful, or illustrated some 
type or period of art. As a result his collection of prints fur- 
nished a good illustration of etching and engraving, from the 
earliest rude woodcuts of the fifteenth century, through the vari- 
ous growths of improvement, down to the parchment proofs of 
the modern etcher. Diirer, Rembrandt, Ostade, Wille, Schon- 
jauer, and many others, exemplified the old school, while 
through a multitude of the French, German, Italian, and Eng- 
lish artists were traced the growths of modern art. All the wall- 
space that could be spared from the paintings and framed en- 
gravings was devoted to book-cases well filled. The ancient and 
the English classics were well-nigh complete, and every modern 
writer of note, in any department of learning, could find upon Mr. 
Beecher's shelves the best of his brain's offspring. As in art, so m 
literature, he bought nothing because it was rare, but only because 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 647 

it would gratify the higher tastes or could teach something. 
The student in any department of art, science, manufacture, 
agriculture, medicine, or theology would find in Mr. Beecher's 
library the best authorities in his special branch of study, and 
generally with the marks of careful reading apparent upon 
their pages ; while the professional man, whose life had been 
devoted to the study and practice of his particular profession, 
has often wondered how Mr. Beecher could have found it possi- 
ble, with his many duties, to acquire a theoretic knowledge, in 
that branch of learning, so accurate and comprehensive. The 
solution of the mystery lay in the fact that he never had to learn 
a thing twice. The knowledge he acquired he retained. He 
was remarkably watchful and observant was deeply interested 
in everything that was going on about him ; and when he be- 
came interested in a subject, would buy all the books he could 
find that would enlighten him, and study them carefully. He de- 
lighted in visiting workshops, factories, laboratories, studios, and 
all other places where men worked, there watching attentively 
the worker, and in a few probing questions reaching such facts 
as he had failed to find in his books — applying the precept he 
gave his children : learning what he could by his own observa- 
tion, then filling the gaps by questioning. 

While his memory of words, dates, and the like was very 
bad, rendering it almost impossible for him to quote accurately, 
or recall figures or dates, yet his memory of facts was wonder- 
fully accurate. The language by which he learned a fact he 
could seldom repeat, but the information he never forgot. The 
former was only the shell ; it was the meat of the nut alone 
that he cared for. 

Of course in making up his library he bought many books 
which in fact he never used, for he said : " A library is like a 
bountiful table, on which each guest can find everything that 
he wants ; yet it don't follow that each guest must eat from 
every dish. My library is the table for my mind, from which I 
take what I want to-day, and from which I can get what I may 
want at any time hereafter." His library was eminently a work- 
ing library. Most of his books were bought when he was still 
a young minister, when economy and love of books waged con- 
stant warfare, of which contest we give his humorous descrip- 
tion : 



648 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" Alas ! where is human nature so weak as in a book-store ? 
Speak of the appetite for drink, or a bon-vivant's relish for din- 
ner ! What are these mere animal throes and ragings to be com- 
pared with those fantasies of taste, of imagination, of intellect, 
which bewilder a student in a great bookseller's temptation- 
hall ? . . . 

et Then, too, the subtle process by which the man satisfies 
himself that he can afford to buy. Talk of Wall Street and 
financiering ! No subtle manager or broker ever saw through a 
maze of financial embarrassments half so quick as a poor book- 
buyer sees his way clear to pay for what he itiust have. Why, he 
will economize ; he will dispense with this and that ; he will 
retrench here and there ; he will save by various expedients hith- 
erto untried ; he will put spurs on both heels of his industry ; 
and then, besides all this, he will somehow get along when the 
time for payment comes ! Ah ! this Somehow ! That word is 
as big as a whole world, and is stuffed with all the vagaries and 
fantasies that Fancy ever bred on Hope. . . . 

" Moreover, buying books before you can pay for them pro- 
motes caution. You don't feel quite at liberty to take them 
home. You are married. Your wife keeps an account-book. 
She knows to a penny what you can and what you cannot af- 
ford. She has no * speculation ' in her eyes. Plain figures make 
desperate work with airy * somehows.' It is a matter of no small 
skill and experience to get your books home, and in their places, 
undiscovered. Perhaps the blundering express brings them to 
the door just at evening. ' What is it, my dear ? ' she says to 
you. ' Oh ! nothing — a few books that I cannot do without.' 
That smile ! A true housewife, that loves her husband, can smile 
a whole arithmetic at him in one look ! Of course she insists, 
in the kindest way, in sympathizing with you in your literary 
acquisition. She cuts the strings of the bundle (and of your 
heart), and out comes the whole story. You have bought a whole 
set of costly English books, full bound in calf, extra gilt ! You 
are caught, and feel very much as if bound in calf yourself, extra 
gilt, and admirably lettered. 

" Now, this must not happen frequently. The books must 
be smuggled home. Let them be sent to some near place. 
Then, when your wife has a headache, or is out making a call, 
or has lain down, run the books across the frontier and threshold, 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 649 

hastily undo them, stop only for one loving glance as you put 
them away in the closet, or behind other books on the shelf, or 
on the topmost shelf. Clear away the twine and wrapping-paper, 
and every suspicious circumstance. Be very careful not to be 
too kind. That often brings on detection. Only the other day 
we heard it said somewhere : ' Why, how good you have been 
lately ! I am really afraid that you have been carrying on mis- 
chief secretly.' Our heart smote us. It was a fact. That very 
day we had bought a few books which ' we could not do without.' 
After a while you can bring out one volume, accidentally, and 
leave it on the table. ' Why, my dear, what a beautiful book ! 
W T here did you borrow it ? ' You glance over the newspaper, 
with the quietest tone you can command : ' That ? Oh ! that is 
mine. Have you not seen it before ? It has been in the house 
this two months." And you rush on with anecdote and incident, 
and point out the binding, and that peculiar trick of gilding, and 
everything else you can think of ; but it all will not do — you 
cannot rub out that roguish, arithmetical smile. People may 
talk about the equality of the sexes ! They are not equal. The 
silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish ten men. 
Of course you repent, and in time form a habit of repenting." 

When we consider how strongly developed was his love of the 
beautiful, we are not surprised at his fondness for music and 
precious stones. At first the two seem widely dissimilar, but to 
his mind they were only different forms of the same thing, and 
to both he was profoundly impressionable. Gems and precious 
stones were only valued for their color. They were color crys- 
tallized, and to color he was peculiarly and strangely suscepti- 
ve Music was color expressed in terms of sound. The one 
s color to his eye, the other to his ear. The mere enjoyment 
sweet sounds and beautiful colors we can readily understand ; 
it is common to all who can see or hear, in greater or less de- 
gree. But the marked peculiarity in Mr. Beecher's case was 
what we might describe as their drug effect. This is not, perhaps, 
unusual with others in the case of music, for, with many, soft and 
gentle music will quiet the excited mind, soothe the soul, and 
bring peace where the tempest raged. This was so with him, 
but in a greater and more marked degree. Colors would produce 
the same effect. When disturbed or nerve-tired, or when, after 
some marked effort in the pulpit or upon the platform, he found 



65O BIOGRAPHY OF 

his brain aflame and every nerve keyed to the highest tension, 
he would sit down in his study, take out from his pocket or table- 
drawer an opal, garnet, hyacinth, or flashing diamond, hold it 
lovingly in his open hand, drinking in through his eyes the soft, 
rich rays of color. Almost as if by magic, the turgid veins on 
brow and temple grew less prominent, the deep flush upon his face 
softened gradually into its natural color, the muscular tension 
abated, the nerve-strain relaxed, and a soft and gentle peaceful- 
ness settled down upon him, like the comforting shadow of an 
angel's wing. Casting himself upon his bed, he would sleep as 
peacefully as a child upon its mother's bosom. 

A notable illustration of this occurred while in England in 
1863. When he returned to his hotel, after a three hours' struggle 
with the mob in the Philharmonic Hall at Liverpool, he found 
himself still under the excitement of the fierce strife, every nerve 
still vibrating under the strain. The waves of thought and 
imagination rolled through his brain, like the billows of the 
ocean still tossing after the gale has passed. He had been 
roused to the very centre of his being, and it promised to be a 
night of restless, sleepless tossings. He had with him an opal of 
wonderful fire and color. Sitting down in his room, he placed 
the stone in his hand, and for half an hour sat watching the play 
of its changing colors. As he watched, the stormy brain grew 
quiet, a gentle sense of physical fatigue and sleepiness stole over 
him, yielding to which he went to bed, dropping at once into a 
quiet, unconscious sleep, unbroken till, late in the morning, he 
awoke, rested and refreshed. 

These color-opiates he always carried with him; a dozen of the 
finest stones were set in rings and strung upon a key-ring carried 
in his pocket ; while in the recesses of some inner vest-pocket 
were hidden a number of unset stones, carefully wrapped in 
paper. His love in that direction was well known to all the 
prominent jewellers, who laid aside for his inspection the finest 
specimens of those stones for which he especially cared. One 
of these gentlemen writes : 

"Mr. Beecher's iove for fine gems was neither on account of 
their value nor their rarity. He loved them because they spoke 
to him of nature and the God who rules nature, and this voice 
appealed to him most strongly in the specimens which possessed 
the richest colors. He might admire a perfectly clear diamond 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 65 I 

if it was unusually brilliant, but this admiration sank to insignifi- 
cance by the side of that awakened by one possessing color. 
1 How grand,' he would say, 'is that nature which can catch the 
hues of the rainbow and fasten them in imperishable stone ! The 
rainbow passes away, the beautiful flowers fade, but in the love- 
liness of these gems are held permanently the colors of both.' 
In one of my visits to Europe I secured a magnificent diamond, 
which I am confident has never been excelled. Its color is hard 
to describe, but I likened it to molten gold. I had no commis- 
sion from Mr. Beecher to purchase anything of this kind, but 
nevertheless it was for him I bought it, knowing his taste in 
these matters, and consequently I resisted all temptations to sell 
it abroad, and brought it home with me. Mr. Beecher was 
delighted, as I thought he would be, and compared its hue to 
the deep reddish gold of a setting sun. This gem was set in a 
black enamelled ring, and was often worn by him — the only jewel 
I ever knew him to wear. He was as loyal to the gems of his 
cabinet as he was to his animate friends, and indeed the stones 
were also his friends. Rubies, sapphires, amethysts, topaz, hya- 
cinths, aqua-marines, all were objects of his deep love, not alone 
because they gratified his keen enjoyment of color, but also be- 
cause he seemed to read in them a page of the great book of 
nature. Neither was there any superstition connected with or 
tainting this love. The ill-omened opal was a part of his collec- 
tion when the prejudice against it was strongest, and, in fact, Mrs. 
Beecher wore these stones frequently. I have said that richly- 
colored gems were his friends, and so they were, and more. 
From them he gathered inspiration, rest, peace, and even truth 
itself. He saw them, but he also saw beyond them. Their colors 
seemed to him to be one of those mysteries through which God 
speaks to man — a mystery in which his spirit delighted to bathe, 
and from which he seemed to inhale strength and much of that 
inspiration which all nature appeared to yield up to him un- 
grudgingly. His gems gratified his sense of sight, his sense of 
poetry, his sense of a beautiful nature, and, more than all these, 
his sense of an omnipotent divinity. None of them, that I know 
of, had any special history. He loved them for themselves alone 
and for what they might teach him." 

He used to say half -jokingly, but with a great deal of under- 
lying earnestness, that it was the duty of every one to be healthy 



652 BIOGRAPHY OF 

and strong ; that weakness was the penalty which men had to 
pay for disobeying the laws of nature, sins committed either by 
themselves or their parents. Preservation of health was a prime 
duty, its waste a cardinal sin. 

As he preached, so he practised ; he handled his body as an 
intelligent engineer does his engine. He made it a matter of 
careful study. He knew just what he could do with impunity, 
and just what he must avoid. If he found that eating a certain 
thing harmed him, that thing he left alone. For the stomach 
was the furnace and must be kept free and clear ; if that broke 
down, the whole engine came to a standstill. 

He studied the effect upon himself of the various kinds of 
food and drink, and used them at the times and in the manner 
which experience and study taught him would give the best 
results. 

Some things affected him very peculiarly, and of this he took 
advantage in their use. This was markedly so with tea and 
coffee. He found that coffee produced a mild kind of mental 
stimulus that made all things look brighter and more joyous ; that 
its use before preaching stimulated the brighter and happier side 
of his nature, adding a slightly roseate tinge to all he saw. It 
was optimistic. While with tea the effect was the reverse. Ob- 
jects appeared in their more sober, sombre colors. The rosy 
faded into the blue, and while it could not be said that he felt 
depressed exactly, yet the tendency was downward. Life seemed 
somewhat sterner, its responsibilities became more prominent, its 
joys less conspicuous. Tea was slightly pessimistic. 

But, strangely, when he drank both, as he usually did, they 
held each other in check ; he then saw both the lights and the 
shadows of life in their true relation to one another. His mind 
pursued the even tenor of its way. 

Wines, beer, and their like he never used for pleasure or as 
beverages ; as medicines, in certain conditions of stomach dis- 
orders, he found them useful. But then, as his library attests, 
he first carefully studied and investigated the peculiar properties 
of each that he used, and confined their use to the condition in 
which he found them most useful. For instance, Burgundy wine 
was used only to counteract certain tendencies toward hepatic 
trouble. Beer was used only as a substitute for the bromides to 
relieve insomnia. 



REV. I1EXRY WARD BEECH ER. 653 

Writing to a friend, who had inquired anxiously as to the 
truth of certain rumors respecting his use of stimulants, he 
replied : 

"Brooklyn, February 21, 1870. 
" My dear Sir : 

" In reply to your letter of February 14th, I would say that 
I do keep intoxicating liquors of various kinds in my house, and 
probably shall do so as long as I keep house. But I am not * in 
the habit of offering them to my friends when they call.' No- 
thing can be more false or injurious than the impression con- 
veyed by such language. I keep them and use them strictly and 
always as I would medicine, and I should as soon think of offer- 
ing a well man a dose of rhubarb as a dose of brandy. 

" I am a total abstainer, both in belief and in practice. I hold that 
no man in health needs or is the better for alcoholic stimulants ; 
that great good will follow to the whole community from the 
total disuse of them as articles of diet or luxury ; and that so soon 
as the moral sense of society will sustain such laws, it will be 
wise and right to enact prohibitory liquor laws. My practice 
strictly conforms to my precepts. When I was depressed in 
health, at times, I have made use of various kinds of stimulants, 
precisely as I would have used drugs — indeed, as a substitute 
for them. This has been occasional, exceptional, and wholly 
medicinal. . . ." 

Careful as he was himself, he disliked exceedingly to have 
others looking after or inquiring about his health. If unwell, 
he would lie down, and in careful dieting and sleep soon find 
relief. On such occasions he preferred to be left to himself, 
undisturbed by questioning or fussing. If well, he repelled so- 
licitude by jokes or humorous bantering. 

Exposed so constantly in his lecture-tours (in one season 
travelling twenty-seven thousand miles) to the danger of accidents, 
and to sickness through unavoidable exposures, it was not strange 
that Mrs. Beecher felt no little anxiety for his welfare, and when 
rumors came back, with the usual newspaper distortions and ex- 
aggerations, her solicitude would naturally be greatly increased. 
On one occasion, when her anxiety, in consequence of some rumor, 
became too great to be restrained, she wrote an anxious letter to 
him, inquiring about his health and expressing her fears. She 
received the following characteristic letter in reply : 



654 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" My dear Wife : 

" I see that you are incorrigible. O cruel woman ! will not 
forty years of incessant assault suffice ? 

" How many heads have you crushed ! Not a bone in my 
body that you have not broken ; not a method of mutilation that 
you have not tried. You have plunged me down ravines, pitched 
me over precipices, drowned me, burned me, torn me asunder. 
I have lost innumerable arms, legs, and feet. I go limping, 
handless, toward I know not what dire future. You have con- 
spired with every element of earth, air, and water, by day and by 
night, and wrung out every terrible fate that ever poet sang or 
Dante dreamed of. I do not think that there is — well ! well \ 
Just think of this latest. I had some disturbance in my stomach 
— you turn me end for end and call it apoplexy. I was faint — 
you changed it to paralysis. I am getting to crouch and creep 
through life in fear that you have set some terrible disaster upon 
me. I think I see leaves winking mischief at me. Every stone 
seems ready to fly at me. Cars and engines are traps, and seem 
to say, ' Will you walk into my parlor, Mister Fly ? ' . . . I am 
fighting fine — my knees better, head clear ; and if I only had 
a wife " (Mrs. Beecher was then in Florida) " I should be per- 
fect." 

What a careful observance of the rules of health did toward 
keeping his body in thorough working order, sleep did for his 
brain. Every hour of sleep that he could gei; he counted clear 
gain ; but even that was regulated according to the drafts made 
upon his brain. During vacation time, or when he had but little 
work on hand — rare occasions — he found the night's rest suffi- 
cient. But on Sundays, while lecturing, or when pressed by 
mental work of any kind, he would supplement the night with 
a long nap in the afternoon. So long as he kept his health and 
had sleep enough, no amount of work tired him. Under such 
circumstances it might almost be said that his brain worked spon- 
taneously ; thinking came as easily and naturally to him as 
breathing. 

He was spared the mental drudgery that oppresses so many 
men. His own illustration was that " some men are like live 
springs, that bubble up and flow perpetually ; while others are like 
pumps — one must work the handle for all the water he gets." 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 655 

His methods of preparation for the pulpit were peculiar. In 
one sense his whole life was a constant preparation, for he was 
always observing and studying, laying up stores for future use, 
seldom knowing just when he would utilize the material, yet 
sooner or later employing it all. His memory was a great maga- 
zine, filled with ammunition, on which he drew as the occasion 
required. This might be called his general preparation. Just 
before preaching or speaking he would enter into his special pre- 
paration, unlock the magazine, and lay out the material he wished 
to use. This he would do just in advance of speaking (his am- 
munition was highly volatile, and, if left exposed too long, was 
apt to evaporate and be lost). 

His Sunday-morning sermons were prepared after breakfast, 
and the evening sermons after tea. He would retire to his study 
and think out the result which he wished to reach, making out- 
line notes of the steps by which he proposed to reach it. He 
could never preach a sermon on a given topic unless it was in his 
mind. It sometimes happened that after wrestling with his sub- 
ject in his study for an hour or two, and finally preparing a very 
unsatisfactory outline of wmat he wanted to preach, he would go 
to his church, and, while the choir were singing the opening 
hymn, the whole subject would come up before his mind in the 
form he wanted. Hastily tearing a fly-leaf from his hymn-book, 
or taking the back of his notes, he would sketch out in a few 
lines the new-born sermon, which would perhaps occupy an hour 
in its delivery. These were very apt to be among his best ser- 
mons. 

Speaking on this subject, he once said : " My whole life is a 
general preparation. Everything I read, everything I think, all 
the time, whether it is secular, philosophic, metaphysic, or scien- 
tific — it all of it goes into the atmosphere with me ; and then, 
when the time comes for me to do anything — I do not know why 
it should be so, except that I am of that temperament — it crystal- 
lizes, and very suddenly too, and so much of it as I am going to 
use for that distinct time comes right up before my mind in full 
form, and I sketch it down and rely upon my facility, through 
long experience, to give utterance and full development to it 
after I come before an audience. There is nothing in this world 
that is such a stimulus to me as an audience. It wakes up the 
power of thinking and wakes up the power of imagination in me." 



656 BIOGRAPHY OF 

After a speech or sermon had once been formed in his mind, 
if not soon delivered, it would evaporate and be lost. While he 
might recall it, it would be in different form. 

When in the delivery, and the thoughts were surging at full 
tide through his brain, he became like one inspired, but half- 
conscious of his external surroundings. 

The sermon once preached, and his mind quieted down to its 
normal condition, it would be impossible for him to recall or re- 
peat the words and expressions that had but just left his lips. 
The general outline, the result, he could of course recall, but the 
language was a part of the inspiration, and left him with it. 

His reply to one asking for a copy of a prayer illustrates this : 

" You request me to send you the prayer made on Decora- 
tion Day evening. If you will send me the notes of the oriole 
that whistled from the top of my trees last June, or the irides- 
cent globes that came in by millions on the last waves that rolled 
in on the beach yesterday, or a segment of the rainbow of last 
week, or the perfume of the first violet that blossomed last May, 
I will also send you the prayer that rose to my lips with the 
occasion, and left me for ever. I hope it went heavenward 
and was registered there, in which case the only record of it 
will be found in heaven." 

The thought and labor necessary to keep up with his duties 
as pastor, editor, and lecturer would seem to have been enough 
to tax to the uttermost his time and strength. But, by a kind of 
selfish blindness, the general public seemed wholly unconscious of 
the value of his time. By post or in person, an unending stream 
poured in upon him, seeking everything that human ingenuity or 
perversity could suggest. 

Begging for help in every conceivable form. One wanted 
three thousand dollars to lift the mortgage from his farm. A 
clergyman in distress asked for a thousand, saying that the Lord 
would repay it. A young theologian asked that Mr. Beecher 
would write him a lecture that he might deliver, and from its 
proceeds pay his education for the ministry. A school-girl 
requested that he write for her a composition, suggesting the 
topic and briefly outlining the way she wished it treated. An- 
other came in person from a distant State, requesting that he 
adopt and educate her ; as she had exhausted her means com- 
ing on, he had to pay her fare back, One man, who had discov- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 657 

ered the locality of Captain Kidd's treasures, wanted him to bear 
the expense of their exhumation, the profits to be divided. These 
are a few actual incidents in the line of begging letters. 

He has described the callers : 

" It is six o'clock in the morning. The day is begun. The 
family are emerging. Breakfast will be ready in half an hour. 
You look for the Tribmie. The bell rings. A man has called 
thus early for fear you might be out. You despatch his business. 
Sitting down to breakfast, the bell rings, and the servant says the 
man will wait. But what pleasure can one have at a meal with a 
man upstairs waiting for him, and the consciousness of it hasten- 
ing the coffee and the toast on their way ? You run up. Can 
you marry a couple at so-and-so ? That is settled. Prayers are 
had with the family. The bell rings once, twice, three times. 
When you rise there are five persons waiting for you in the front 
parlor. A young man from the country wishes your name on his 
circular for a school. A young woman, in failing health by con- 
finement to sewing, does not know what to do ; behind in rent ; 
cannot get away to the country ; does not wish charity, only 
wishes some one to enable her to break away from a state of 
things that will in six months kill her. Another calls to inquire 
after a friend of whom he has lost sight. While you are attend- 
ing to these the bell is active, and other persons take the place of 
those who go. A poor slave-mother wants to buy her son's wife 
out of slavery. A kind woman calls in behalf of a boarder who 
is out of place, desponding, will throw himself away if he cannot 
get some means of livelihood. Another calls to know if I will not 

visit a poor family in great distress in Street. A good and 

honest-looking man comes next ; is out of work, has ' heard that 
your " riverince " is a kind man,' etc. Another man wants to get 
his family out from Ireland ; can pay half, if some one will inter- 
cede with ship-owners to trust him the balance. A stranger has 
died, and a sexton desires a clergyman's services. Several per- 
sons desire religious conversation. It is after ten o'clock. A 
moment's lull. You catch your hat and run out. Perhaps you 
have forgotten some appointment. You betake yourself to your 
study, not a little flurried by the contrariety of things which you 
have been considering. You return to dine. There are five or 
six persons waiting for you. At tea you find others also, with 
their divers necessities. 



658 BIOGRAPHY OF 

" This is not overdrawn, and for months of the year it is far 
underdrawn. There is no taxation compared to incessant va- 
rious conversation with people for whom you must think, de- 
vise, and for whose help you feel yourself often utterly incompe- 
tent." 

Half of his life-work would have been left undone had he 
attempted to have given the letters and callers his personal atten- 
tion. All that related to his pastoral duties, and much besides, 
he attended to personally. The rest he turned over to his wife. 
If his life has been a benefit to mankind, then the world owes a 
heavy debt of gratitude to her for the self-sacrificing protection 
she afforded him. She was his helpmeet indeed ; nine-tenths of 
his correspondence she carried on. Few save his church-mem- 
bers and personal friends had access to him until she had first 
learned their errand, and determined whether the case was one 
that should be brought to his attention. Yet, with all this care, 
he seldom saw less than ten or a dozen callers each day while he 
was at home. 

The drain upon his purse was constant, for he could hardly 
withstand a tale of suffering and want. Of course he was not 
infrequently imposed upon, as every generous man is apt to be. 
He used to say that the satisfaction of relieving one really de- 
serving sufferer was compensation enough to make up for being 
swindled ten times. 

Nor was his generosity, or its abuse, confined to those who 
sought material aid. Among those who engaged his affection 
and confidence, some there were who, Judas-like, turned against 
him when it seemed for their interest to do so. Toward these he 
never felt resentment, save momentarily under the smart of some 
sudden, treacherous blow. The love which he once gave to a 
friend he never forgot. He would be very slow to believe any 
one, once trusted, to be unworthy, and never lost a deep and ten- 
der feeling for such, even after he felt that they were unworthy 
of confidence. It was this feeling that led to no little criticism 
at the hands of those whose cynicism made trusting hard and 
hating easy. By these his tender, sympathetic trustfulness was 
called "gush" and "slopping over." To their criticisms he 
replied : 

" I suppose I do slop over sometimes. Well, I never saw a 
pan just full of milk that did not slop over. If you do not want 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 659 

any slopping-over, take a pint of milk and put it in a big bucket. 
There will be no slopping-over then. And a man who has only 
a pint of feeling, in an enormous bucket, never slops over. But 
if a man is full of feeling, up to the very brim, how is he going 
to carry himself without spilling over ? He cannot help it. 
There will be dripping over the edges all the time. And as 
every flower or blade of grass rejoices when the rain falls upon 
it, so every recipient along the way in which a man with over- 
flowing generous feeling walks, is thankful for his bounty. 

" How to carry a nature full of feeling, and administer it 
without making mistakes, I do not know, you do not, nobody 
does, nobody ever did, and nobody ever will ; so we must take 
it and get along as best we can. Life is a kind of zigzag, any- 
how ; and we are obliged to resort to expedients, and make ex- 
periments, and learn from our blunders, which are inevitable. 
We find out a great deal more from men's mistakes than from 
their successes. 

" But, after all, I am not sorry that I have been imposed 
upon, and that I have trusted men that were not worthy to be 
trusted. I am not sorry that I have been duped. It falls out 
from an abundance of generous feeling. It is the mistake of a 
disposition that I think it is a great deal better to have, with all 
the impositions which it suffers, than that kind of cold caution 
which prevents your venturing anything on the side of kindness, 
because you always want to be safe. 

" I was much impressed with what I once heard my father 
say. His chance sayings have been like rudders to me all my 
lifelong. A man whom he had befriended, and done a great deal 
for, turned against him and acted very meanly. One day father 
came home very much exercised about it, and I expected he was 
going to blow out — for he shook his head in a peculiar way that 
he had when his feelings were very much wrought up. He said 
(raising his hand, and bringing it down slowly, but with great 
emphasis), ' Well, when I have acted honorably toward a man, 
and he goes away and acts meanly toward me, I am never sorry 
that I acted honorably toward him ! ' 

" Now, I think that was a sign of nobility." 

Plymouth Church, although the principal field of his ministe- 
rial work, was not by any means his only pastorate ; he had a 
number of other subsidiary pulpits. Most prominent among them 



660 BIOGRAPHY OF 

was the White Mountains. Such was his thirst for work in 
the fields of his Master, he made even his infirmities an instru- 
mentality for good. For nearly thirty years he had been afflicted 
with that but little understood American malady, "hay fever," 
which attacked him every year about the 16th of August, almost 
to the day. For nearly six weeks he suffered the torments of 
that distressing malady ; during which reading, writing, and 
almost all forms of mental work were impossible. 

Finally his attention was called to the exemption which the 
clear, bracing air of the White Mountains afforded, and, trying 
the experiment, happily found complete relief. The first year 
or two he merely rested, but after that he began holding, at first, 
informal services Sundays ; then the large hotel parlor became 
the church, and every Sunday morning he preached. Soon the 
demand for more room crowded them out, and then one of the 
great tents used in the State fairs was secured, filled with benches. 
Here, during the last two or three years that he visited the Twin 
Mountain House, he preached regularly every Sunday during his 
six weeks' vacation. 

From the neighboring hotels and all the adjacent towns the 
people came by hundreds, filling the great tent. Each morning, 
after breakfast, fifty to a hundred of the guests would gather in 
one of the smaller rooms and join with Mr. Beecher in family 
prayers. To these he read a chapter from the Bible, briefly ex- 
pounding its meaning, and then made a short prayer. 

Another field in which he worked, widely different from any 
other, was the State militia. In January, 1878, he was invited to 
take the chaplaincy of the " Brooklyn Thirteenth," as it was 
called, and accepted the invitation. His reasons for this step 
we give in his own words : 

" It was not because I had nothing to do, and wanted to fill 
up vacant time. It was not, certainly, because I have any emi- 
nent military gifts, or what might be called a military spirit, by 
which I am led to delight in such things. I was as much sur- 
prised as any one could be when the invitation came through 
Colonel Austen, bearing the request of all the officers and all the 
privates in this regiment that I should act as their chaplain. 

" After the surprise had a little subsided, of course my first 
impulse was to say, ' No, I cannot.' My second thought was, 
' Is it a matter simply of your own convenience, or is there a 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 66 I 

moral duty here ? ' The question came, not exactly ' Should 
you ? ' but, ' Why should you not ? ' Is it not an eminently wise 
and proper thing for a body of citizen- soldiery to have a chap- 
lain, and ought we not to be grateful that they desire it ? Made 
up, as our regiments are, of young men in the prime of life, in 
this and in all associations of men, unrestrained and uncivilized, 
one might almost say, in the absence of woman, great mischiefs 
have often ensued from a relaxation of moral principle, a sort of 
vortex being formed, down which young men might slide to their 
destruction ; and therefore it is a matter of importance that they 
should have a moral influence thrown about them. And when 
the request came from the Thirteenth that I would act as their 
chaplain, it seemed to me that somebody ought to answer their 
request ; and there were some reasons why I thought I should 
answer it. I was forward in all those movements which brought 
on the war, and during the whole period of the conflict I did as 
much as I possibly could to bear my part of the responsibility ; 
and with the end of the war, to drop the whole matter of our 
citizen-soldiery and show no more interest in them, to throw 
them aside as an instrument employed and worn out and no 
longer of use, did not appear to me wise or proper. 

" Moreover, many of these young men belong to my congre- 
gation and to my parish ; they were therefore in some sense my 
own sheep, after whom I ought to look ; and I reasoned that if 
it was desirable to have a citizen-soldiery as a kind of back- 
ground on which civil authority could retreat in times of great 
peril, it was eminently desirable that that soldiery should be 
moral, manly, expert, and in every way fitted for the high task 
to which they were assigned. 

" Under those circumstances, because I am an old citizen 
here, because I have a right in some sense to be a father to the 
young men in this neighborhood, and because I very heartily be- 
lieve in the formation of these centres of citizen-soldiery, I did 
not feel at liberty to shrink from the duty that was laid upon me; 
and I went with the hope and purpose, not simply as a mere re- 
cipient of courtesy, but with the feeling that I might be able to 
do them good — to do them good in the first instance as soldiers, 
and in the second instance as men." 

As their chaplain he preached to his "boys " — as he was fond 
of calling them — at stated intervals, and, as far as his other en- 



662 BIOGRAPHY OF 

gagements permitted, attended at their reviews and public pa- 
rades. 

Of course his inexperience in military matters led to many- 
amusing incidents. 

Being a capital horseman, he found no trouble in maintaining 
himself in his saddle ; but when it came to manipulating his 
sword, his troubles began. Then the path to martial glory did not 
seem easy. His first trouble was to get his sword drawn ; once 
drawn, he was puzzled to know what on earth to do with it. He 
almost invariably neglected to salute his reviewing officer, to the 
great amusement of his fellow-members on the staff, who en- 
joyed bantering him. As one of his colonels remarked : 

" His temporal sword was a source of some anxiety to him, 
and he always drew it with reluctance, preferring, as he said, to 
wield the more familiar 'sword of the spirit.'" 

Next to his sword the receipt of military orders bothered 

him most, leading often to humorous comments to those about 

him or to his commanding officer. To one of these orders he 

replied : 

"December 19, 1884. 
"My dear Colonel: 

" I enclose a circular with a humble request for its interpreta- 
tion. It is, without doubt, clear as crystal to the military mind, 
but to my peaceful mind it is as dark as theology, or a pocket, 
or midnight, or a wolf's mouth. 

" It orders, first and beginning, that we are to come in fatigue 
uniform, without side-arms. 

" It ends by ordering us to bring our best coat, knots, and 
swords. I humbly inquire whether one end of this letter does 
not seem to eat up the other. 

" Shall I wear my resplendent chapeau or my ridiculous cap, 
in which I look like a pumpkin with a ribbon around it ? Shall 
I wear my coat and golden straps, or my other military coat, 
which I have not got, and never had ? 

" Lastly, may I go directly to Historical Hall, and not to the 
armory ? 

" I am, your ignorant chaplain and captain, 

" Henry Ward Beecher. 

" Are overcoats forbidden ? Thermometer nearly down to 
zero ! " 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 663 

On another occasion receiving a circular printed by one of 
the reduplicating processes then in vogue, but which was nearly 
illegible from the paleness of the ink, he wrote the colonel : 

"February 12, 1885. 
"My dear Colonel : 

" I do admire black ink and legible writing. I return you a 
model. Do help me. 

" (1) Is this a spiritual communication — from some feeble 
spirit to some pale-ink medium ? How shall I reply ? Do you 
keep a heavenly mail ? 

"(2) Or is it from Wolseley, asking me to come to the 
Soudan ? I cannot go, of course, without your permission. 

" (3) Or is it merely an advertisement of a writing-master, 
showing how to increase piety by teaching men to live (and read) 
by faith, and not by sight ? 

" (4) In that case have you got any more clerks — who can 
write invisible messages ? I might want them for my Sunday- 
schools. 

"(5) You ought to send out a reader (if this is a military 
document) to inform all who read it what it says. 

" (6) On the theory that it is a regimental order, I shall soon 
commence studying the tactics, and be ready for a parade — 
which, if it resembles the writing, ought to take place at mid- 
night, after the moon is gone, by the light of oil street-lamps. 

" H. W. B." 

As chaplain he enjoyed the " rank and pay" of captain, and 
on all military occasions was addressed as " Captain Beecher." 
A few years after his appointment, being at the New England 
dinner with General Grant, the latter referred to him several 
times as " major." Supposing it to be a slip of the tongue, 
" Captain" Beecher said nothing about it. A few nights later they 
met again at some other public dinner, when the general per- 
sisted in calling him "colonel"; then the captain protested, but 
Grant assured him laughingly that the next time he should pro- 
mote him to be general, " and if you don't keep on going higher 
it will be because the titles give out." We believe he never got 
above " general." 

All of those who were familiar with Mr. Beecher, either in the 



664 R^v. Henry ward beeCher. 

pulpit, on the platform, or in social life, are familiar with that 
moral courage which led him to face unhesitatingly an adverse 
public sentiment in defence of what he believed to be right. The 
preceding pages are filled with many illustrations of this. 

His physical courage, though perhaps not so well known to 
the public, was quite as pronounced as his moral courage. Ath- 
letic, self-reliant, and in his younger days wonderfully agile, he 
faced the most threatening danger without a tremor of his nerve. 

In his advocacy of the slave he daily carried his life in his 
hands. At Liverpool he faced undaunted an imminent danger, 
no doubt largely averted by the utter fearlessness of his bearing. 
But in more marked degree was his courage shown in an inci- 
dent, never made public, that occurred soon after he settled in 
Brooklyn. 

A rabid dog, with lolling tongue and dripping jaws, threaten- 
ing death in its most frightful form, appeared suddenly in the 
street near his house, and fortunately ran for a moment into the 
area under the front-door steps of a neighbor's house, where he lay 
crouching in the corner, with his glaring eyes turned to the door- 
way. In the street children were playing ; at any moment, the 
impulse to spring out might seize the beast. Seeing the danger, 
Mr. Beech er sprang instantly to the area-door, within less than 
four feet of the crouching brute, and closed the gate. Stepping 
back to his house, he got his axe. When he returned the dog 
was rushing furiously around in the confined space, striving to 
get out. Raising the axe with one hand, with the other Mr. 
Beecher opened the area-door, and as the dog sprang at him 
struck him dead with one blow. 



CHAPTER XXXII. 

1886 — England Revisited — Speaking in the City Temple — Westminster 
Abbey — Lecturing through Great Britain — Addressing the Theological 
Students at City Temple — " Life of Christ " — Sickness — Rest. 

FOR several years before his death earnest efforts were made 
to induce Mr. Beecher to revisit England. His manly fight 
against such odds, in 1863, had quite captured the heart of 
the English people, who always have a tender feeling for a good 
fighter. 

What began as admiration steadily grew and deepened into 
affection. His sermons, his writings, and even the meagre reports 
of lectures and speeches, were eagerly read — quite as much so in 
England as in America. 

And when the great cloud of scandal loomed up in 1873-6, 
none were any more steadfast and loyal in love and confidence 
than the friends in old England. Among the many testimonials 
treasured by his family are the resolutions of sympathy and con- 
fidence received from clerical associations in England, Scotland, 
Wales, and even from the distant provinces. 

With each succeeding year the importunities that he should 
spend a summer in England increased, until, in the early spring 
of 1886, he finally decided to brave the discomforts of an ocean 
voyage — to him no slight trial — and visit again his English 
friends. This being a trip of peace and not of war, he deter- 
mined to take Mrs. Beecher with him. His decision was made 
the latter part of May. The next Sunday he made the an- 
nouncement from the pulpit. On the following Sunday he 
preached his farewell. The church was packed, if possible, fuller 
than usual, the throng crowding around the pulpit- steps at the 
close of the service to say farewell. 

He engaged passage on the Etruria for Saturday, June 19. 
The Friday night preceding the regular prayer-meeting night be- 
came a regular leave-taking. The services were over by nine 
o'clock, and from that hour until eleven Mr. and Mrs. Beecher 

665 



666 REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

were the centre of a circle of friends that filled the lecture-room 
and overflowed into the church auditorium, anxious to shake 
hands and say God-speed. 

The Etruria was to start early Saturday morning, so Mr. and 
Mrs. Beecher went aboard Friday night. 

Promptly at six o'clock the hawsers were cast off, and the 
great steamer slowly drew out from the pier, and, gathering head- 
way, turned her prow eastward and slowly steamed down the 
bay. Almost simultaneously the excursion steamer Grand Re- 
public, with three thousand friends — whose enthusiastic affection 
had called them, before the sun was up, to pay their farewell trib- 
ute — left her wharf in Brooklyn to intercept the Etruria in the 
Upper Bay. Just off Liberty Island the Etruria slowed down 
and the Grand Republic came alongside ; her passengers, crowd- 
ing to the nearer guards, gave vent to their feelings in ringing 
cheers. Mr. and Mrs. Beecher, standing on the upper deck, re- 
sponded with hat and handkerchief. The band aboard the Grand 
Republic played " Hail to the Chief," the whistles of the steam- 
ers saluted, and as the Etruria, getting under way again, 
forged rapidly ahead, the choir of Plymouth Church sang the 
Doxology, the sweetly solemn notes growing fainter as the steam- 
ers drew apart. 

Going below, they found their staterooms literally embanked 
in flowers. One enthusiastic friend had left twenty homing 
pigeons, with instructions to release them at stated intervals dur- 
ing the day. To these short notes were attached, and borne back 
by the swift, home-seeking wings, being the last words to many 
friends until the cable announced Mr. Beecher's safe arrival at 
Queenstown on the 26th. 

Our space forbids an attempt to give more than a very gene- 
ral account of this visit ; a full account of the entire trip has 
already been published, with verbatim reports of the sermons and 
lectures delivered by Mr. Beecher in England.* 

It would be impossible in cold words to express the deep and 
tender feelings with which Mr. Beecher put his foot again on 
English soil after -an absence of nearly a quarter of a century. 
Memory, swift-flying, ran back through the twenty-three years 

* " A Summer in England with Henry Ward Beecher." By J. B. Pond. 
Published by Fords, Howard & Hulbert, of New York City. 




Mr. and Mrs. Beecher at Time of Visit to England in 1886. 

66 7 



668 BIOGRAPHY OF 

past, and like some grand panorama the impressive events, both 
national and personal, moved by his mind's eyes in silent pro- 
cession. 

Slavery, that blight upon America's fair name, had been blot- 
ted out, and the places that had known it, knew it no more for ever. 
The struggle for national existence, which had been hanging al- 
most on even balance when, twenty-three years before, he had 
raised his voice in this same land, and pleaded the nation's cause, 
had ended in complete victory and triumphant vindication of 
those principles for which he had contended. It was with no 
little pride that he was able to stand again before an English au- 
dience and say " that every single substantial sentiment that was 
set forth in those several popular addresses had now become 
history." 

Within that same period he had himself passed through 
the flood of a personal persecution which, for persistent and 
malignant intensity and unchristian bitterness, exceeded any- 
thing recorded in the annals of history. He had seen his name, 
his life-work, all that he had lived and labored for, threatened 
with black destruction. Through this he had passed, emerging 
safely upon the firm shore of the continued love and confidence 
of his countrymen. Nor could he forget the assurances of fullest 
trust that came to him from public utterances and private letters 
of the many friends in England : 

" For no other nation except our own have I such strong 
affinities as for Great Britain. My ancestors came from there. 
I have been bred on its literature. I have fed on the thought 
and feeling of its heroic men. I am a child, though born away 
from home, of the English people ; and God forbid that I should 
be indifferent to those throes which are to bring forth the man- 
child yet ! I look with profound sympathy, with the feeling of a 
child that venerates a parent in distress, upon that people ; and 
I go there with a heart as warm for them as it was for its own 
country in the day of its division and trials. Twenty-three years 
— and what a space between ! Twenty-three years ! Darkness, 
thunder, tears, blood, and war — they have gone, and the white 
mantle of peace is spread over our shores, and the fields laugh 
and rejoice, and the heavens are propitious, and the earth is 
bountiful, and men are growing more and more into manliness. 
What hath God wrought ! " 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECHER. 669 

After a short rest in Queenstown, Mr. and Mrs. Beecher went 
direct to Liverpool ; there on the 28th he had an opportunity to 
hear Mr. Gladstone, meeting him after the address. 

The next day they proceeded to London, where, on the fol- 
lowing Sunday, Mr. Beecher was to preach for Dr. Parker at 
the City Temple. On Thursday he attended the regular week- 
day services held in that church every Thursday, intending to 
enjoy the unusual pleasure of listening to somebody else's 
preaching. But after the sermon Dr. Parker insisted upon his 
addressing the meeting and closing it in prayer. On calling Mr. 
Beecher to the pulpit, the doctor spoke a few words in tribute 
to his friend, concluding with the much-quoted sentence : 

" My brethren, I am sorry to break in upon a man's singu- 
larity, so that the palm may, even for a moment, seem to be di- 
vided between two ; I am, however, constrained to violate the 
sanctity of a definite personality, and to say that last week there 
was in England a Grand Old Man : to-day there are two of them ! " 

On the 4th he preached for Dr. Parker, and on the 5 th 
attended a dinner given to him by the lord mayor of London. 
On the nth he preached for Dr. Henry Allen in London, and in 
the afternoon attended the service at Westminster Abbey, calling 
afterwards, by previous invitation, upon Dean Bradley, with 
whom were present a number of the clergymen of the Church of 
England, who had been invited to meet him. After tea the dean 
invited him to visit the various historical private rooms of the 
Abbey. 

Many of the rooms were quite as familiar to Mr. Beecher, 
through his reading, though never seen before, as they were to 
the clergy of the church itself. These listened with intense 
interest to his familiar exposition and discussion, of what must 
have seemed to them to be their own peculiar province of history. 

The " Jerusalem Chamber " greatly impressed him. " I am 
struck with awe. No room has greater interest to me, unless it 
be the ' Upper Room.' " 

He recalled with deep interest the many notable events that 
had there occurred intimately connected with religious history — 
the Westminster Assembly, the Confession of Faith, the two 
revisions of the Bible, etc. This was to Mr. Beecher a red- 
letter day, fuller of quiet, tender enjoyment, probably, than any 
other during his stay. 



67O BIOGRAPHY OF 

On the 19th, as he said, his play-day being over (he had 
preached every Sunday, generally twice, and delivered addresses- 
every week), his work began. At Exeter Hall, London, where 
he delivered the last of the famous speeches in 1863, he delivered 
the first of his lectures in 1886. From that time on until the 
21st of October he lectured, on an average, four nights a week, 
preaching every Sunday. A letter home gives some humorous- 
experiences : 

" . . . . You would be amused at the way of public meetings 
in England and Scotland. After the lecture the chairman calls 
on some one, previously agreed upon, to move a vote of thanks r 
which he does, with a speech in which he pours out such a flood 
of compliments that before he is half through you lose all sense 
of personal identity, and wonder what heroic personage he is. 
talking about, and then he moves the distinguished gentleman a 
vote of thanks. Thereupon the chairman informs the audience 
that Reverend or Professor So-and-so will second the motion. 
He takes up the thread of eulogy where the other bit it off, and 
winds you up with golden cords until you swing high in the 
heavens. Thereupon the vote is put by the chairman, the audi- 
ence raise their hands, and then fall into a perfect tempest of clap- 
ping ; as this subsides, you are expected to rise and, with modest 
self-depreciation, to explain how much you are elated and how 
grateful you are. . . . But it is after the assembly is dismissed that 
the most serious business of the evening begins. All on the plat- 
form shake hands ; women climb up and shake you ; at every step 
downward a host of hands — men, women, girls, and boys are 
reaching ; the hallway is crowded with men that pull you, shake 
you, hustle you ; the outward passage is lined with scores and 
scores, and finally, on the sidewalk, the rush to get your hand is 
fearful, and the police have to crowd them back to get you into 
the carriage, and then the windows bristle with more hands, 
and as the carriage moves on the crowd run along by its side 
still fiercely pushing each other to get a chance to shake. 

" A ludicrous event happened at York. Just away from the 
hall is a bridge, for which foot-passengers pay a cent and car- 
riages two cents. A woman or girl stands out on the sidewalk, 
extending her hand for the fee. After I had shaken hands at 
the hall, along the street, with scores, we came to the bridge,, 
hardly yet shaking off the crowd. *A hand was thrust into- 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 6jl 

the window, which I shook ; the woman said something indis- 
tinctly, which I afterwards learned was, 4 A penny, sir.' Thinking 
it some affectionate blessing, I took her hand again, and gave 
it a more emphatic shake. She put her face in the window and 
said, 'A penny, sir'; Pond meanwhile sitting by and laughing 
heartily. 

"Your mother, too, frequently comes in for her share, and 
you can imagine how comical she looks as, with a modest smile 
and some surprise, she deals out her ' thank you's ' to the host of 
admirers." 

From July 4, when he preached first for Dr. Parker, un- 
til his departure, October 24, Mr. Beecher preached seventeen 
times, delivered nine public addresses and fifty-eight lectures. 
This was his summer vacation. From this period of restful 
recreation, such was his peculiar capacity and enjoyment of men- 
tal activity, he derived great benefit ; and on his return home, 
after a few days' rest from the disturbing influences of the, to 
him, ever-unrestful ocean, he declared that he never felt stronger, 
or more vigorous, or better equipped for work in his life. In the 
course of his stay he visited and lectured in each of the cities, 
and generally in the same hall where he had " fought with the 
wild beasts of Ephesus," as he used to say, in 1863. 

Just before his departure he addressed one meeting which, on 
account of its peculiar significance, we must mention more fully 
ere we pass on. So much has been said of late in certain quar- 
ters respecting Mr. Beecher's theology, so many criticisms upon 
his orthodoxy, that his standing among so conservative a body as 
the English clergy may not be uninteresting. He had already 
addressed the London Congregational Board, the Congregational 
School (for the sons of Congregational clergymen), and had 
preached nearly twenty times, so that there had been a tolera- 
bly fair opportunity to learn something of his religious views, 
when he was invited to address the theological students on the 
subject of preaching. 

The meeting was held in the City Temple, October 15. Six 
hundred students attended, the remaining space in the body of 
the house being occupied by ministers, who came from all parts 
of the country to attend this meeting. It was understood that 
Mr. Beecher would, after the address, answer such questions as 
any might want to ask. As the hour fixed was eleven o'clock in 



672 BIOGRAPHY OF 

the forenoon, all of the theological schools had to rearrange their 
school-hours for that day, in order to allow the scholars a chance 
to attend. This was done with great readiness. After an ad- 
dress of nearly an hour, he offered to receive such questions, 
pertinent to the topic discussed, as might be put by the scholars 
or any of the clergy present, and occupied the remainder of his 
time in answering them. 

On the 24th Mr. and Mrs. Beecher boarded the Etruria at 
Queenstown for their return home, reaching New York on 
the 31st. 

In accordance with his expressed wishes no attempts were 
made to " receive " him, but he was allowed to go quietly home 
and rest, his people reserving their welcome until the following 
Sunday.* On that day the church was decorated with flowers 
and evergreen vines, the pulpit being literally a bank of flowers, 
which ran up along the face of the great organ, even to the 

* The Common Council of Brooklyn voted him a public reception,, 
which he declined. The resolutions were as follows : 

" In Common Council, Stated Session, 
Monday, Nov. 8, 1886. 
"The following was presented : 

" Whereas ; This Common Council has heard with pleasure of the re- 
turn from abroad of that distinguished American, our fellow-citizen, the 
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher ; and 

11 Whereas, In recognition of the eminent services rendered to his 
country and mankind, both here and on the other side of the Atlantic, of 
the broad and generous nature of his manhood and of his genius, which 
has already shed its lustre for half a century ; therefore be it 

"Resolved, That his Honor the Mayor be, and he is hereby requested 
to offer to the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, on behalf of the Mayor, 
Aldermen, and Commonalty of the City of Brooklyn, a public reception 
at the Academy of Music, at such time as may suit his convenience. 

"Resolved, That a committee of five members be appointed by the 
chair, who, together with his Honor the Mayor, of which committee he 
shall be chairman, shall make the necessary arrangements for such recep- 
tion, and to insure an adequate expression on that occasion of the honor 
and esteem in which the citizens of Brooklyn, without distinction of party 
or creed, hold this their distinguished and beloved fellow-citizen. 

" The resolutions were unanimously adopted by the following vote :" 

(Signed by the Mayor and Common Council). 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 673 

ceiling. After the service his people thronged around the pulpit- 
stairs for one shake of the hand and one word of welcome. 

Early in the winter he began to seriously think of completing 
the second volume of the "Life of Christ." Friends and mem- 
bers of his family had for some years been urging that the book 
should be completed. A fatality seemed to have hung over that 
book. 

At the time when the Tilton conspiracy first broke out he 
had written a considerable part of Volume II., and undoubtedly 
would have soon finished it, when that outbreak, with the church 
persecutions that followed, interrupted the work, and for a num- 
ber of years kept his mind so engrossed in other matters as to 
make writing an impossibility. This was followed by the busi- 
ness embarrassments of his publishers, and then the care of re- 
organizing the Christian Union. At last, peace and quiet having 
been restored, he. began again to arrange for the completion of 
the work, when a vexatious suit was brought against him by 
Samuel Wilkeson, who had bought the original contract for the 
book from the publishers at an assignee's sale, and, claiming that 
Mr. Beecher had broken his contract, sued for $60,000. The 
pendency of this suit stopped all further work on the book. 
After some delay the cause was tried and the complaint promptly 
dismissed by the court. 

Twice, after the suit, an attempt was made by Mr. Beecher to 
accomplish the long-deferred completion of the book, but on 
each occasion something occurred to interrupt and further defer 
the work. 

Finally, in January, 1887, he determined to complete the book, 
and at the same time to write his Autobiography. No small 
part of the credit for this final determination is due to Major 
J. B. Pond, who for many years past had been Mr. Beecher's 
lecture manager, and who joined with Mr. Beecher's family in 
urging the undertaking of both works. Finally it was decided 
that he would deliver no more lectures during the year 1887, 
but devote all of his time outside of his church duties to these 
literary labors. 

In February a contract was made with Charles L. Webster & 
Co., of New York — our present publishers — to publish both books. 
The "Life of Christ " was to be completed before July 1, 1887, 
and the Autobiography before July 1, i< 



674 BIOGRAPHY OF 

With great zeal Mr. Beecher began at once to re-read, revise, 
and complete the " Life of Christ," sometimes resting his mind 
by changing his work and writing a little on his Autobiography. 
In this way, by March i, he had revised all of his former manu- 
script of the " Life of Christ," and had completed it down to 
chapter xxv. Eight chapters of Volume II. were completed in 
this manner, and the outlines of the remaining three, within 
which space he intended to complete the work, were clearly 
blocked out in his own mind. As he got more and more back 
into the long-interrupted current of thought, his interest deep- 
ened, and with increased interest came greater mental ease. 

Several times he remarked that he had never seen the subject 
so clearly and luminously in his mind before. It seemed at 
times as though Christ's life were revealed to him with a clearness 
and a nearness that had never before been given him. In one of 
his exalted moods he burst out : " Twenty men could not in a 
life-time write all I now see ; how can I put it into one book ? " 

But a few days before his last sickness an English clergyman 
called to see him, and after a pleasant chat, as he rose to leave, 
asked if there was any prospect of his completing the " Life of* 
Christ." Mr. Beecher replied that he was at work on it then, 
and would probably finish it in two or three months. The 
clergyman was greatly delighted, saying that he had been 
long waiting, hoping for the second volume. As the visitor left, 
Mr. Beecher, kneeling in his great arm-chair, as was often his 
wont when in a reverie, with one elbow on the chair-back, and 
chin resting in his open palm, gazed in silent abstraction out of 
the window facing him. Suddenly, his face lighting up, he ex- 
claimed, as though thinking aloud : " Finish the Life of Christ ! 
Finish the Life of Christ ! Who can finish the Life of Christ ! 
It cannot be finished." 

Prophetic words ! Almost within the week he was called to 
that closer communion with his Saviour, and entered into that 
lasting peace for which he had so often longed. 

During the day of Thursday, March 3, he was in the best of 
spirits and apparently perfect health. He had repeatedly stated 
since his return from England that he had never felt better, or 
better able to work. We had often during the past month jok- 
ingly called him the youngest boy in the house. None of us 
dreamed that Thursday was to end his long career of usefulness. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 675 

During the night he awoke, complaining of nausea, and was 
taken with vomiting, but soon fell asleep again. Friday morning 
he did not get up ; though he roused when spoken to, he would 
immediately after fall asleep again. These symptoms disturbed 
no one, as they were quite common whenever he had any bilious 
trouble. The family thought that something he ate for supper 
had disagreed with him, and that he was working it off in his 
usual way, by sleeping and lying quiet. 

Friday afternoon the doctor was for the first time called in. 
He thought, with the family, that the trouble was with the 
stomach, though some symptoms made him think that perhaps 
there might be some other complicating causes than mere bilious- 
ness. 

Later in the evening, when one of his sons called in, he roused 
himself quite fully, called for toast, complained that his feet' 
were cold, and that his head ached some. When asked what 
was the matter, he replied, jokingly, in a sort of half-sleepy 
manner : 

" I had a dream last night. I thought that I was a duke and 
your mother a duchess, and I was trying to figure the interest on 
a hundred thousand pounds a year — you know I never was good 
at mathematics. It gave me a headache ; but I'll have your 
mother boil a page of arithmetic and make a tea of it. I'll cure 
it homceopathically." 

He was then helped to sit up in bed and eat his toast, which 
he did with eyes still closed, as though half-asleep. When laid 
back upon his pillow he fell asleep at once. 

Saturday morning the dreadful truth first became apparent. 
Dr. Searle found that the left side showed unmistakable signs of 
paralysis, and then, recalling the previous symptoms, which had 
been attributed to other causes, said at once that it was apoplexy 
and that there was nothing to hope for. At first none would 
believe the diagnosis. Up to that moment all had thought the 
illness nothing that need cause any apprehension, when with the 
suddenness of a lightning-stroke came the announcement of utter 
hopelessness. 

That no chance should be overlooked, Drs. Hammond and 
Helmuth, of New York, were called in consultation during the 
day, and confirmed the hopeless diagnosis. Nothing could be 
done — nothing but wait. The patient did not suffer ; only 



676 BIOGRAPHY OF 

those who stood about his bed, watching the beloved face, suf- 
fered. 

Several times during Saturday afternoon, in response to loud 
questions put by the doctors, he roused enough to comprehend 
the questions and briefly answer them. With each attempt his 
articulation became more difficult. 

After the consultations were over he never spoke again. His 
unconscious sleep became deeper and more profound through 
Sunday and Monday, until Tuesday morning, at twenty minutes 
to ten, his breath grew fainter — then stopped. The end he had 
hoped for was his. As warriors of old prayed that they might 
die in full armor, not a piece wanting or rusted from disuse, in 
the full activity of the fight, so he prayed that he might be 
spared the slow wasting of disease or the impairment of his 
physical and mental powers. 

No black, no mourning drapery of any kind, was permitted 
about the house or on his coffin. At the door hung a beautiful 
wreath of delicate pink and white roses, gathered at the top by 
a large white satin bow, renewed afresh each morning by the 
hands of a beloved friend. 

Against every form of mourning he had always revolted ; to 
him death was but the gate to heaven, and the black symbols of 
ancient paganism he could not endure : 

"The scholastic theology, filled with gloomy ideas sifted 
through stern Romish minds from teachings of pagan Romans 
has come down to us, until the representations of death that 
exist in the literature of Rome are more abominable and cruel 
than all the vices of all the Neros, or any other of the corrupt 
emperors. The scholastic conceptions of dying and of death are 
unworthy of reason, unworthy of conscience, and are blasphemous 
to God and to His government. They have no foundation in the 
New Testament, none certainly in the Old, and they ought to be 
purged out of our imaginations. Yet it lingers with us, and when 
death has come the household has not one note of triumph, not 
one star shines through the grief, nor one door of flashing light 
is opened. We cover the pictures, we shut up the instru- 
ments of music, we close the windows and shut out the light ; 
we have a black hearse with plumes plucked from the wings of 
midnight, and we send for our minister, who doles out lugubri- 
ous, mournful themes, and we sing awful hymns. And then be- 



RE V. HENR Y WARD BEECHER. 677 

cause one's child has gained the coronation of glory, and is in the 
arms of Jesus, and rests from all labor and trial and temptation, 
we put on black — black over the head, black around the neck, 
black down to the feet, black inside ! We carry the habiliments 
of woe and darkness and gloom, and think that we can see death 
everywhere. No other thing is as this. The one thing that men 
carry everywhere with them, and they are bound to share alike 
with brothers, strangers, friends, is that one thing that is bor- 
rowed from the despotism and cruelty of heathenism. Not one 
joy, not one thanksgiving, not one gleam of faith and hope, not 
one promise of Jesus Christ, not one single second of immortal- 
ity and glory, is permitted to cheer the soul. All is night, black 
night, hopeless night. Sinful, the whole of it, unchristian, un- 
grateful ! . . . 

" One of the most beautiful things I ever saw in my whole 
European tour was the burial place of a Prussian queen who 
died during the great struggle against Napoleon, when the nation 
was ground almost to extinction, leaving her kingly husband al- 
most inconsolable. At some distance from the capital, and in 
the midst of the solemn wood, he built a temple to her memory. 
It was of marble. As I entered, the light shone down through 
blue glass, casting a sad, sorrowful tone on all that its rays shone 
upon. But further on, upon entering the inner chamber, the 
cheerful light of God's sun streamed in through the numerous 
windows and illuminated the ceiling, which was covered with 
glowing Scripture passages of death and immortality. And there 
in that blessed sunlight lay the sculptured form of the queen, 
forming the most perfect embodiment of rest, and peace, and 
triumph that my eyes ever beheld. There was nothing, sad or 
sorrowful, or painful to be seen ; only the light of the glory of 
God as set forth in the sun ; and the whole room glowed with 
cheer and brightness, and the monument was not gloomy but 
peaceful. I bless God with all my heart for that sight ; it 
has been a comfort to me in many a dark day and long strug- 
gle of suffering, for already have I seen the triumph of death, 
the sweetness and the peace of victory, in that monumental 
marble." 

On Thursday a private funeral service was held at the house, 
the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Hall, of the Church of the Holy Trin- 
ity, officiating, in accordance with the expressed wish of Mr. 



678 REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Beecher. Between the two a deep and lasting friendship had 
existed. In the dark days, when not a few of the clerical breth- 
ren of his own denomination in Brooklyn doubted, or, hesitating, 
held back awaiting the result, Dr. Hall, in a manner characteris- 
tic of his brave and manly nature, went out of his way to show, in 
public, his confidence and love for Mr. Beecher. The latter at- 
tending service one day, during the time when the clouds hung 
heaviest, at the Church of the Holy Trinity, the doctor, seeing 
him in the congregation, descended into the aisle, and, taking his 
friend by the hand, led him to a seat within the chancel. Mr. 
Beecher, always forgetful of injuries, never forgot an act of 
friendship. It was his oft-repeated wish that, should he be called 
first, the voice of this brave, beloved friend might speak the 
words of cheer and comfort to those he left behind. 

At the close of the service, Company G, of theThirteenth Regi- 
ment — which, having been largely recruited from the young men 
of Plymouth Church, was called the " Plymouth Company," and 
affectionately styled by Mr. Beecher " My boys " — with arms 
reversed, banners furled, and muffled drums, marched to the 
house, and, as a guard of honor, escorted the body of their pas- 
tor, chaplain, and friend to the church, as he was borne for 
the last time within its doors, and laid him, silent for the first 
time, at the foot of that pulpit from which his voice, during well- 
nigh forty years, had so often rung out to right the wrong, to lift 
up the down-trodden, to uphold the weak, to elevate mankind ; 
that had so often preached comfort to the sorrowing, light to those 
in great darkness, pointing out the way of life to struggling sin- 
ners, and revealing that boundless love of God which was the 
keynote of his theology. 

Till Saturday morning an almost continuous stream passed 
through the church to look in a last farewell upon the face of a 
friend, scarcely ending with midnight, renewed again by day- 
light, all day long. Old men and children, rich and poor, met to 
mourn a common loss. 

He rested in a bed of flowers, the coffin hidden from sight by 
twining smilax, covered with white pinks and rosebuds ; pulpit 
and organ buried in flowering shrubs and graceful plants, deco- 
rated with many floral designs. 

On Friday morning the public funeral service was held, Dr. 
Hall preaching the sermon. , 




Lying in State in Plymouth Church. 



679 



68o BIOGRAPHY OF 

Simultaneous with the services at Plymouth, funeral services 
were held in the three nearest adjoining churches. 

On the proclamation of the mayor, business was suspended 
during the day ; the Legislature adjourned, sending a special 
committee to attend as its representatives at the funeral. 

On Sunday a memorial service was held in Plymouth Church, 
in which the representatives of every creed took part — Jew and 
Gentile, Catholic and Protestant — and nearly every denomination 
of Protestantism vying each with another in paying tributes of 
respect, gratitude, and love to their common brother — a most fit, 
practical example of that for which he had always .preached, the 
universal brotherhood in God. 

On Saturday, the 12th, the body was taken quietly to Green- 
wood. 

" To-day Henry Ward Beecher's body was buried in Green- 
wood. His hearse was followed in sympathy and honor by mil- 
lions of his countrymen. The mourners were of all kindred and 
of every language. Not in this generation, at least, has there 
been a funeral so nobly significant. In the stately procession 
walked the viewless forms of principles, of governments, of na- 
tions, and of races. The guardian spirit of the slave whom he 
helped to liberate ; the fair, sad genius of the Green Isle, for 
which he so often and so eloquently pleaded ; the dusky repre- 
sentative of the Chinese Empire, in behalf of whose sons he again 
and again demanded justice ; the fair form of modern science 
with the radiance of the morning sun on her queenly brow ; the 
benign angel of charity, clothed in the whiteness of that purity 
which renders sin invisible ; democracy, with her free step, flow- 
ing hair, and cap of many hues ; Columbia, full of matronly grace 
and benignant as the atmosphere of June ; and Christianity, 
calm, motherly, and forgiving — these are the pall-bearers by 
whom the body of our hero was borne to its resting-place. . . ."* 

On a sunny slope in that most beautiful of all cemeteries, 
overlooking the Bay of New York, is the grave of Henry Ward 
Beecher. But it is only the grave : " When I fall, and am buried 
in Greenwood, let no- man dare to stand over the turf and say, 
* Here lies Henry Ward Beecher,' for God knows that I will not 
lie there. Look up ; if you love me, and if you feel that I have 

* From the Brooklyn Citizen of March 12. 



REV. HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 68 I 

helped you on your way home, stand with your feet on my turf 
and look up ; for I will not hear anybody that does not speak 
with his mouth toward heaven." 

With all our sorrow we cannot begrudge him the rest and 
peace so well earned, nor that for which he had so often prayed 
— a quiet, painless departure while yet each faculty was unim- 
paired. He remembered with deepest pain the failing years of 
his own father, who lingered till all his faculties became impaired: 

" My venerable father, who was a second David in his time — a 
man of war — and yet who had as sweet a heart as ever an angel 
woman had, lived through many last years of weakness and ob- 
scuration, and I had to remember a great way back to find my 
father. It was very pitiful, very painful. 

" That is one reason why I do not want to be an old man. I 
hope God will have so much consideration for my weakness — if 
it be a weakness — as to let me drop down in my harness and in 
the full energy of work. I have no fear whatever of dying : it 
is only the fear of living that I have before my eyes. . . . 

" Some persons talk about a man having passed through a 
stormy life, and sitting now at the end of his life in quiet, prepar- 
ing himself for heaven. Heaven does not want any such prepara- 
tion as that. That is the best preparation which a man makes 
when he is using the whole force of his being in his day and 
time. I would rather die with the harness on and be dragged 
out by the heels. I would like to fall in the traces. You cannot 
help scoring one year against yourself and growing old in one 
way ; but it is the outward man that is growing old. The wine 
that is in you ought to be growing better and better every year. 
Time should mellow and ripen it. True, if a man's power is 
dried up, he cannot do more than he has strength for ; but every 
man should do up to the measure of his strength, and not forget 
the sudden appearing of God in his own day and in his own 
time. 

" I love those streams that run full, clear to the ocean. Some 
men there are who are like mountain streams, torrent-fed, that 
boom in the spring, with wondrous glory of fulness and power, 
and go rushing through the earlier months, but slacken their 
speed, and by midsummer are only a trickling reminiscence of 
the river. I like to think of streams like the old Merrimac, that 
begin work up near their head-waters, and never run a league 



682 BIOGRAPHY OF 

without turning some mighty wheel of industry, and have no va- 
cation to the end, but go into the sea with the very foam on their 
surface." 

For him death had no terrors ; it was the gate opening into 
eternal rest and peace — that peace for which he had so often 
yearned and longed in his later years. Death was the wel- 
come friend, not the dreaded foe. 

" Is there anything sweeter to grief and sorrow than that 
passage where the New Testament, sweet book of the soul, 
speaks of dying ? Let Tuscanized Romans talk of death ; let 
heathen mythologies come to us with skulls, and cross-bones, 
and hideous images of dying, of the monster Death, of the 
tyrant Death, of the scythe-armed Death, of a grim and terrible 
fate ; but what terror can any of these representations have for 
us when we have for our encouragement and hope the promises 
of the New Testament ? 

" On a summer's day the gentle western wind brings in all the 
sweets of the field and the garden ; and the child, overtasked by 
joy, comes back weary, and climbs for sport into the mother's 
lap ; and before he can sport he feels the balm of rest stealing 
over him, and lays his curly head back upon her arm ; and look \ 
he goes to sleep ; hush ! he has gone to sleep, and all the chil- 
dren stand smiling. How beautiful it is to see a child drop 
asleep on its mother's arm ! And it is said, * He fell asleep in 
Jesus.' Is there anything so high, so noble, or divine, as the 
way in which the New Testament speaks of dying ? How near 
death is, and how beautiful ! 

" If you have lost companions, children, friends, you have 
not lost them. They followed the Pilot. They went through 
airy channels, unknown and unsearchable, and they are with the 
Lord ; and you are going to be with Him, too. I die to go, not 
to Jerusalem, but to the New Jerusalem. I die, not to wait in 
the rock-ribbed sepulchre, which shall hold me sure ; I die, that 
when this body is dropped I shall have a. place, in the inward 
fulness of my spiritual power, with the Lord. 

" Then welcome- gray hairs ! they come as white banners that 
wave from the other and higher life. Welcome infirmities ! they 
are but the loosening of the cords preparatory to taking down 
the tabernacle. Welcome troubles ! they are but the signs that 
we are crossing the sea, and that not far away is our home — that 



REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 683 

house of our Father in which are many mansions, where dwells 
Jesus, the loved and all-loving. And let us rejoice that He has 
gone from the body, that He may be ever present in the spirit, 
and that ere long we may be with Him." 

His life had been full and complete. Unconsciously, in 
words of matchless beauty, he painted his own picture when he 
said : 

" And the most beautiful thing that lives on this earth is not 
the child in the cradle, sweet as it is. It is not ample enough. 
It has not had history enough. It is all prophecy. Let me see 
one who has wrought through life ; let me see a great nature 
that has gone through sorrows, through fire, through the flood, 
through the thunder of battle, ripening, sweetening, enlarging, 
and growing finer and finer, and gentler and gentler, that fineness 
and gentleness being the result of great strength and great know- 
ledge accumulated through a long life — let me see such a one 
stand at the end of life, as the sun stands on a summer afternoon 
just before it goes down. Is there anything on earth so beautiful 
as a rich, ripe, large, glowing, and glorious Christian heart ? No, 
nothing." 



APPENDIX. 



685 



APPENDIX. 



Mr. Beecher's trial lecture was the first sermon which he preached 
as a clergyman. It may be interesting, both from that fact and because, as 
Mr. Beecher himself once remarked, it shows how commonplace a sermon a 
man might write who subsequently attained to some eminence as a preacher. 

Trial Lecture. 

For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and retutneth not 
thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may 
give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater : so shall my word be that goeth 
forth out of my mouth; it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish 
that which J please, and it shall p?-osper in the thing whereto I sent it. — Isaiah 
lv. IO, II. 

No one can read the Bible, even superficially, without observing how 
much it brings in the natural world to illustrate the truths of the moral. 
Of the truths of God's government or of his own Being it may be said 
" the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly 
seen, being understood by the things that are made." The passage assigned 
as the subject of this lecture is remarkable in this respect, since two depart- 
ments are compared — the truth of God is compared with the elements. 

It will be particularly noticed here that no formal analogy is set up 
between the effect of truth and the effect of natural causes. Nor are the 
two compared in all respects. 

It is not intimated that truth acts as natural causes act — that truth pro- 
duces effects on mind in the same way as rain does upon the earth and its 
vegetation. Nothing of this. The comparison instituted respects one thing, 
and only one thing, and that is the equal certainty of two things. The 
passage teaches simply and only that there is as much certainty that the 
truth of God will produce its appropriate results, in its own way, as there 
is that natural elements will, in their own way, produce their natural re- 
sults. Those who attempt to draw a parallel between the operations of 
God's moral government and His natural one, and call upon this passage 
for witness, neither understand the import of this text nor the nature of 
the thing whereof they treat. 

It is a comforting declaration, and to none more so than to Christians 
who love truth. We often fear that it will be covered up, its influence de- 
stroyed; that through the weakness of men, or the power of evil, or some 
disastrous reverse of events, its power will be lost. And particularly are 

687 



688 APPENDIX, 

ministers, whose chief duty it is to study truth, to promulgate and confirm 
it throughout the community, liable to despond when they find themselves 
coping with so many malign influences, so much coldness, and scepti- 
cism, and worldliness, and ignorance. If they look only upon the narrow 
scale upon which they labor, it often would seem as if there were indeed no 
power in truth, no certainty that it would fructify. 

It is an assurance, then, to our faith, and a great comfort to us in our toil, 
when we listen to Him who sitteth in the heavens, and before whom all 
things are open and naked — who sits serene above all the whirl which dis- 
tracts and confuses us on this dusty earth, and hear Him say, seeing the be- 
ginning from the end of all things : " For as the rain cometh down, and the 
snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and 
maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread 
to the eater: so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth; it shall 
not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it 
shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." 

We design at this time to draw from our text a few obvious inferences, 
to confirm and illustrate and apply them. 

I. We may infer that truth is adapted to produce moral results in this 
world. 

How it produces them we shall not examine. It is a matter of philoso- 
phy, of speculation, and we concern ourselves with the practical bearing of 
our text. 

This inference will appear the more plainly true if we consider — 

i. That the Bible is explicit upon this head. Paul says to Timothy: 
" From a child thou hast known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make 
thee wise unto salvation, through faith which is in Christ Jesus." 

And not satisfied with specific assertion, he generalizes and makes it 
a general principle: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and 
is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in 
righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished 
unto all good works " (2 Timothy iii. 16-17J. 

Could anything be more untrue, if truth has not an adaptation to pro- 
duce what it is said to do? 

Throughout the Bible God regards truth as sufficient to accomplish His 
purposes, and nothing is so severely dealt with, by rebuke and judgment, 
as that deficiency and sin which comes of neglecting or refusing truth. 

" What more could I have done for my vineyard than I have done? 
Wherefore, when I looked, that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth 
wild grapes ?" 

A constant visible Providence, mighty acts, the record of wonderful de- 
liverances and mercies, and the institutes of a beneficent law — were not 
these adapted to produce the required obedience in the Jews? If truth 
have not adaptation to produce moral results, the Jew very pertinently 
might have replied to this severe rebuke : What has been done to pro- 
duce obedience? Nothing but a series of truths have been given which 
have no adaptation or tendency to produce holiness. 



APPENDIX. 689 

Nothing has been done to make us other than we are. And in exact 
accordance with the spirit of this was Christ's teaching when He said: " If I 
had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin; but now they 
have no cloak for their sin " (John xv. 22). 

2. The very object for which truth was revealed confirms the truth of 
our inference. It was revealed either for something or for nothing. If 
for nothing, it was foolishness. But if for something, then either it was 
fitted to produce what it was created for, or it was not. If it was not 
adapted to produce that for which it was created, then God attempted to 
bring to pass an end with means ill-adapted to that end. He raised up an 
instrumentality without adaptation to do what he desired. But what is 
meant by instrumentality, which has nothing of an instrument in it ? What 
is instrumentality without any adaptation to do anything ? Consequently 
if we would avoid imputing such weakness, such double folly and failure 
to God, we must admit with the Bible the adaptation of truth to produce 
its appropriate moral results. 

Men travel across the express declarations of His word, and cross 
reason, to support a philosophical theory which, after all, destroys the very 
thing for which they framed it. 

3. Our inference becomes still more apparent in truth if for a moment 
we admit the opposite doctrine and watch its results. 

(1) The law is composed of truths respecting God, His relations to us, 
and ours to Him — the duties flowing thence, the penalties and rewards re- 
spectively of disobedience or obedience, our duties to one another, etc.; 
and all this professedly is given to restrain from evil and produce good. 

But if truth has no adaptation to produce moral effects, the law was 
designed to do what it had no adaptation to do. It could have no influ- 
ence and no power, and God is represented as framing a law to do what it 
had no relevancy to do. 

(2) The character of God — why is it held forth to excite admiration 
and love, if that has no adaptation to excite such feelings ? 

There is nothing in God, nothing in His attributes, which can awaken 
the least emotion, unless truth can work out moral results. 

(3) And precisely so of all the recorded doings of God since creation, 
especially that stupendous spectacle — the Atonement. All is thrown 
away as respects influence upon intelligent moral beings, they are utterly 
worthless, if they have no power to do anything. In short, this theory, so 
unfounded, so monstrous either in philosophy or fact, so repugnant to 
every declaration of God, would destroy every influence which the Bible 
was sent to produce. 

It cuts off the mind from any influence except that by which a stick or 
stone might be moved from place to place. The strong declaration of the 
Bible that men resist the truth — how, if nothing to resist ? 

We admit that truth, as a matter of fact, does not produce its legitimate 
results without the influence of the Holy Spirit. But then the reason lies 
in the depravity of our hearts, and not in any want of adaptation in the 
truth. 



690 



APPENDIX. 



God made it ample, it was enough to create infinite obligation, and, 
if unresisted, to have kept us from sin and trained us up in holiness. Our 
depravity resisted its action, and would always ; and this is the ground and 
necessiiy of the interference of the Holy Spirit. 

Not the want of light, but men love darkness better ; not the want of 
adaptation in truth, but men resist it, and will do so for ever, unless God 
shall send the Holy Spirit. In His hands truth becomes omnipotent. He 
pierces with it the darkest eye, and sounds it upon the deafest ear, and 
rouses up the deadest heart, "enlightening by it their minds spiritually 
and savingly to understand the things of God, and effectually drawing 
them to Jesus Christ, being made willing by His grace." 

We are not, however, to rest satisfied with this mere intellectual view 
of this point. It has very deep, practical importance, which I shall briefly 
lay open to you. 

1. It shows you the importance of knowing what the truth is exactly. 

God has made truth to produce certain results of good, and no sub- 
stitute for it will. The husbandman who would raise a harvest of wheat 
must sow wheat, not something which is only very much like it. The 
Christian who would have the fruits of truth in his heart must believe the 
truth, and not something that is very much like it. 

He who would have the fruits of God's love in his heart, who would 
grow rich in the graces of the Spirit of God, must understand God's char- 
acterize/ as it is revealed — i.e., just as it is, for it is the truth of His char- 
acter which will produce salutary results, and nothing else will. Hence 
those who entertain false views of God have a deficient condition of 
mind and heart in exact proportion as they deviate from the truth ; and 
this is the reason why those who reject the Divinity of our Lord and Sa- 
viour wane in piety, in happiness, and finally experience from their view 
of God hardly one beneficial result. They have expected that what was 
not true would produce in them the effect of what was true. Consequently 
we find the sacred writers anxiously inculcating a diligent, careful stud)' 
of the character of God, as Paul to the Colossians (chap. ii. 2, 3): " That 
their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love, and unto all 
riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgment of 
the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ ; in whom are hid all 
the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." 

And just before : " That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all 
pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the know- 
ledge of God." 

So, too, Eph. i, 17: "That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the 
Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in 
the knowledge of Him.? 

2. So also respecting doctrine. We are bound to know exactly what 
God has revealed, for that is to produce the good effect in the hands of the 
Spirit, and not an imagination which we think is true. If by total depravity 
we teach something else than that which the Bible teaches, will the same 
results flow? If, instead of regeneration, as Christ and Paul explain it, we 



APPENDIX. 69 1 

vamp up a theory aside and different from it, will the effect be the same? 
Will the Holy Spirit employ it equally with the other? 

Nay, he who does not preach truth, and believe truth, preaches error 
and believes error. Truth saves, and error destroys. And this is the rea- 
son why it is some matter what a man believes, provided he is sincere. 
God does not regenerate and save by sincerity, but by truth. Error received 
sincerely is only error placed where it shall work out its fullest evils with 
the greatest certainty, and with every help which the heart can afford. Er- 
ror sincerely received is death cordially embraced. 

3. Hence we see how deeply important it becomes for Christians to 
employ prayer and diligent study of the Bible, that the Holy Spirit of God 
may enlighten their minds with all truth. 

All that which constitutes a pure and holy heart must come trom truth; 
ourselves and our hearers are to be saved by truth in the hands of the 
Holy Spirit. How earnestly, then, should we seek His divine, unerring 
guidance! If He teach us, we shall have truth indeed; but if left to our 
depraved hearts how soon shall we draw in error, how soon shall we be 
spoiled by vain philosophy and deceit after the traditions of men, after the 
rudiments of this world, and not after Christ ! And if deserted forever, how 
rapid will be our deterioration from bad to worse, until eternal death do 
close upon us! 

4. The importance of propagating, through all the world, the Bible, 
is most particularly taught in the text, and is most appropriately deduced 
from our position. God has promised that His Holy Spirit shall go with 
it, shall make it effective. Would we fill the earth with the power of 
God's Spirit, send abroad the Bible, by which He has graciously deter- 
mined to act, and through which He will sanctify and save. 

II. The second inference which I draw from this passage is that, 
when the truth is properly explained and applied, we are both allowed and 
bound to expect corresponding auspicious results. 

1. So Christ and His apostles taught by example. Christ refused to 
throw away labor when nothing could be expected from it. Hence He 
never would open to the Pharisees and bigoted doctors of Jerusalem the 
nature of His message, nor descant upon the character of God, nor urge 
upon them His claims, nor urge them to repent, nor work miracles before 
them. He knew the heart of man, and knew that no good would follow. 
If, then, the ground of exclusion from the labors of His ministry was that 
there could be no hope of success, then where He did labor it must have 
been upon the ground of hope of success. 

So Paul repeatedly rejoices in the power of the Gospel to save man- 
kind, and gloried in this with great exultation, proclaiming that on this ac- 
count he was not ashamed of it. 

Now, was it the mere fact that Paul felt that the truths of the Gospel 
had the power, abstractly, to save mankind, without any particular expec- 
tation that they would do so, or did his heart fire because he most con- 
fidently expected that nations would be born to Christ by his preachings ? 
No one whose heart ever burned with a desire of glorifying God by gath- 



692 appendix. 

ering in souls to His kingdom can hesitate to say which of these inspired 
Paul. It is no joy, no subject of particular gratulation, that the Gospel 
can save mankind, unless we also believe that it actually will. 

The only reason why we rejoice in its adaptation to save the world is 
because we believe that the world should be saved. 

How wide of the truth are they who think that a faithful, sincere Chris- 
tian or minister has no right to expect the fruits of their labor, but are 
bound to rest as satisfied that it should not as that it should happen ! It 
is a spirit utterly repugnant to the Gospel. Some would imagine that we 
should not so expect — expect confidently the fruit of our labors — because 
God is a Sovereign and worketh according to the counsel of His own will. 

But this is the very ground upon which we build our confidence. 

It is because God, as a Sovereign, acting most freely and accoiding to 
the purposes of His own will, hath joined to truth its appropriate results, 
and has encouraged us to expect them. If God were no Sovereign, we 
should have no confidence, never knowing' what might or might not hap- 
pen. But now, since He is Supreme, and hath joined truth, well applied, 
to a certainty of corresponding results, we shall most shamefully do vio- 
lence to His Divine Sovereignty if we affect to doubt whether it will in 
fact be as He hath ordained that it shall be. If He had not joined means 
to ends it would be temerity to expect the one from the other. 

But since He has, it would be doubting Him, contradicting Him, if we 
were not so to do. 

To the diligent farmer God gives abundant increase, to the laborious 
artist remuneration corresponding to his skill. To the faithful minister, 
who rises betimes to sow the seeds of life and waters them with his tears, 
God will give him an abundant harvest ; and the diligent Christian who em- 
ploys all the means of truth within his reach, in humble reliance upon 
God, shall not be disappointed. He may expect growth in grace, and God 
will not falsify his hopes. 

The Sovereignty of God is the sure ground upon which every one 
may build his hopes and not be disappointed. For God is not a man that 
He should lie, hath He said, and shall He not do it ? 

2. Success of ministry and Christian effort demand it for very con- 
stitution of our nature. 

3. Only ground on which the multiplied institution of the Gospel can 
be available.* 

III. The third inference which I draw from this passage is that the 
instrumentality of the truth, the efficiency of the means, does not detra.t from 
the tower of God, but highly illustrates it. 

1. It will be observed in this passage that, although so much effi- 
ciency is given to truth, "yet God is continually speaking, and speaking, too, 
in the air of most sovereign authority. Truth is made to appear perfectly 
subservient to his Divine Will. " So shall My word be that goeth forth 

* These two subdivisions were not written out in full, blank spaces being left in the 
original for their fuller elaboration. 



APPENDIX. 693 

out of My mouth : it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish 
that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." 

2. The reason why it illustrates and does not detract from God's su- 
premacy and power may now easily be seen. It shall do just what God 
wishes to be done, and for which He appointed it, and for which He made 
it efficient. Besides this it can do nothing else. It can only do this be- 
cause God so wills. Truth is not an agent acting, since God made it, in- 
dependently of God, self-moved ; nor is it to be turned by man to do as 
he wishes. It does what it was made to do, and God made it, so that all 
its effects are but new examples of the power of God. It hangs where 
God placed it, and shines in the sphere He circumscribed, and nowhere 
else. 

3. It accomplishes this result, which belongs to it, not from any in- 
herent virtue which redeems it from the power of God, and causes its 
effects to illustrate only its own power, but simply and always because 
God pleases that it should do so. As its powers are enlarged and encom- 
pass greater results, so must be the conception of His power who clothed 
it with such efficiency. 

And God always sustains truth, and those circumstances by which it 
can produce fitting results, and if He dropped them for one moment from 
His care they would perish. 

Whoever, then, finds that the employment of means of truth is produc- 
ing a forgetfulness of God, may be assured that he is using them wrong- 
fully. It is a pernicious result wrought in him by abusing our constituted 
mode of action. 

He who properly appreciates the notion of means and instrumentality 
will ever have most occasion to admire both the power and goodness of 
God, and His wisdom too, in that constitution of things which He has 
made. 



INDEX. 



Abolitionists, feeling against, H. W. 
Beecher on, 268, 420 ; ostracized 
socially, 185 ; Webster, Daniel, on, 

239- 

Advance, the, organization of, 491. 

Advisory Council (1874), assembling 
of, 526 ; call for, 523 ; deliverance 
of, 527 ; Plymouth invited at, de- 
clines, 527 ; protest against, a, 524. 

Advisory Council (1876), assembling 
of, 543 ; Beecher, H. W., cautions 
on, to church, 539, statements at, 
544-549, declared innocent by, 550, 
address to, at close, 552; call for, 

537 ; committee on charges, advises 
an, 550, 558; composition of, 538; 
officers of, 543, 544 ; Plymouth sus- 
tained by, 549 ; principle of selec- 
tion of, 538; questions submitted to, 

538 ; Sturtevant's, Dr., opinion of 
Mr. Beecher, 551 ; Wellman's, Dr., 
opinion of Mr. Beecher, 550. 

Allen, Ethan, remark of, on British 
cruelty, 35. 

America, a " better England," 25. 

Amherst, Mass., in 1827, 93 ; 
Beecher's, H. W., garden plot in, 
96. 

Amherst College in 1830, 112; Beech- 
er's, H. W., course at, 109-135 ; 
offers title of D.D. to Mr. Beecher, 

39i- 

Anderson, Gen. Robert, tribute to, 
by Mr. Beecher, 452. 

Anecdotes : Boston woman, the cross, 
118; calf and bees, 637; cannonl 
ball, the, 87 ; cat in the organ, 382; 
cow, chase of the, 141; "Dinah, 
Crazy," 243; dog Noble, 290; 
English beggar, 670 ; " follow-your- 
leader," 85 ; Fulton omnibuses, 
248 ; grammar, lesson in, 75, 76 ; 
Grant, Gen., and Mr. Beecher's 
titles, 663 ; kite, the, 203 ; liquor- 
seller, the, 195 ; lions, two mon- 
strous, 51 ; ruffian, the. 194 ; slaves, 
teaching of, 253 ; sleeper in church, 



186 ; Stowe, Prof., outwitted, 141 ; 
tides, explanation of, 76 ; truant, 
the, 184 ; tub-raft, the, 208; "Tu- 
tor's Delight," 116. 
Arthur, Chester A., opinion on, of Mr. 
Beecher, 575 ; en renomination of, 

576. 
Articles, H. W. Beecher's, sources and 
characteristics of, 325, 326 ; Cause 
and Cure of Agitation (1850), 242 ; 
Christian's Duty to Liberty (1854), 
276 ; Church and Steamboat (1850), 
350, 35i; Contrast, The (1862), 335; 
Controversy, Harsh (1850), 244 ; 
Convictions, Various, and Sin (1852), 
353 ; Country's Need (1862), 328 ; 
Courage and Enterprise (1862), 324; 
Crisis, The (1854), 273 ; Defence of 
Kansas, 283 ; Degraded into Lib- 
erty (1852), 263 ; Different Ways of 
Giving (1850), 352 ; Disbanding of 
Bowdoin St. Church (1862), 98 ; 
Dog Noble and Empty Hole (1856), 
290 ; Dull Meetings, One Cause of 
(1852), 353; Duty, The Great (1862), 
327 ; Duty of the Hour (1862), 323 ; 
Duty of To-day (1862), 330 ; Flow- 
ers in Church (1862), 392 ; Fugitive 
Slave Bill (1850), 240 ; Ground, The 
Only (1862), 333 ; Hearts and No 
Hearts (1856), 287 ; Hours of Ex- 
altation (1857), 373 ; Hymns, 
Church (1855), 366 ; Ice in the 
Church (1852), 353 ; Infidel Toact, 
The (1859), 389; Law and Con- 
science (1850), 240, 241 ; Leader for 
the People (1862), 332 ; Lind, Jenny 
(1850), 351 ; Litchfield Revisited 
(1856), 35 1 Liturgy, Church, 370; 
Men, not Slaves (1862), 323 ; Moun- 
tain and the Closet (1857), 373 ; 
Naval Discipline (1852), 355; News- 
paper Report, on a (i852\ 356; Our 
Help from Above (1862), 323; 
Patriotism of the People (1862}, 
329 ; Proclamation of Ermncipa- 
tion, on (1862), 336 ; Queer Pulpit, 



695 



6 9 6 



INDEX. 



A (1862), 334; Reconstruction 
(1862), 333 ; Remember the Poor 
(1850), 352 ; Root of the Matter 
(1862), 331 ; Salutatory (1861), 321 ; 
Shall we Compromise? (1850), 237 ; 
Silence must be Nationalized (1856), 
287 ; Time, The, has Come (1862), 
332 ; Trumpet, The (1862), 335 ; 
Use of the Beautiful by Christians, 
393 ; War with England (1861), 322; 
Word from the People to Congress 
(1862), 323; Working with Errorists 

(1859), 380. 
Atchison, David R., in Kansas war, 

277. 

Bacon, Rev. Leonard, letters of, 
against Tilton, 527 ; letter of, on 
reconciliation, 559. 

Barnes, Hiram (Litchfield), reminis- 
cence of, 37. 

Beach, Hon. W. A., convinced of H. 
W. Beecher's innocence, 533. 

Beecher, Rev. Charles, anecdotes by, 
of H. W. Beecher, 50 ; music, early 
work in, 92, 138, 139; recollections 
by, of boyhood, 57, 58, of Semi- 
nary days, 139. 

Beecher, David, character of, 17; 
strength of, 20. 

Beecher, Rev. Edward, promotes Ad- 
vance, 491. 

Beecher, Esther, influence of, on H. 
W. Beecher, 68, 69; in Brooklyn, 
352 ; Mr. Beecher's tribute to, 38. 

Beecher, George (son of Lyman), 
death of, 204. 

Beecher, Hannah, reminiscence of, 19. 

Beecher, Harriet (daughter of Lyman) 
— see Stowe, Harriet B. 

Beecher, Harriet (wife of Lyman), ar- 
rival of, at Litchfield, 54; Beecher's, 
H. W., opinion of, 65, religious in- 
struction by, 77, tribute to, 143; 
death of, 143; home training, 
, methods of, 65 ; impressions of 
Beecher family, 54, 55; marriage of, 
to Lyman Beecher, 53; reminis- 
cence of, by Mrs. Stowe, 54. 

Beecher, Henry (1570). notice of, 19. 

Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward, Adminis- 
tration, strictures on, in 1862, 328- 
331, 335; distrusted by, in 1863, 

397, 443, feeling changed, 444. 

Advisory Council (1 876), on, 538 ; cau- 
tions his people as to, 538; state- 
ments at, 544; challenge at, 545; 
demands production of letters, 549; 
declared innocent by, 550; address 



to, at close, 552. 



Agriculture, 



articles on, 182; studies in, 198; 
work in, 199. See under Farm, p. 

698, and Peekskill, p. 701. Aid 

sought from, some samples of, 656. 

Ambition of, for enterprise, 

89; personal, devoid of, 593, advice 
to a relative on, 593, 594. Ameri- 
can, a typical, 25. Amherst Col- 
lege, enters, 109; course at, choice 
of, 112; studies at, 113; reminis- 
cences by Dr. Field, 113, 115, by 
Dr. Haven, 113, by L. Tappan, 114, 
117, by S. H. Emery, 114, by Rev. 
S. Hanks, 114; debate, a victory in, 
114; " Tutor's Delight," 116; sports 
at, 117; financial difficulties, 117; 
plans to earn money, 118; in anti- 
slavery debate, 119; record at, 135. 

Ancestry of, 20, 21; its legacy 

of loyalty and truth, 24. — Ander- 
son, Gen. Robert, tribute to, 452. 

Art, effect of works of, 346-348; 

high, versus decorative, on, 645 : his 

collection of prints, 646. Arthur, 

Chester A., praise of, 575; renom- 
ination of, reasons for desiring, 575, 

576. Aspirations, on youthful, 

89. Attainments of, at ten, 70, 

71. Atonement, on doctrine of, 

607. Auction-sale, slave, imita- 
tion of, 292 Audiences of, on 

early, 594. Autobiography of, 

preparations for, 673. Bacon's, 

Dr. L., letter to, on reconciliation, 

559; reply, 560. Bashfulness of, 

youthful, 70. Battle of, a youth- 
ful, 36. Beautiful, on Christian 

enjoyment of the, 393; in nature, 
his love for, 394. — Beecher, 
Esther, tribute to, 38; influenced 
by, 68. Beecher's, Harriet, im- 
pressions of, 55; instructed in re- 
ligion by, 77; his tribute to, 143. 

Beecher, Lyman, estimate of, 

17; effect on, of conduct of, 68, 69; 
indignant at persecution of, 151. 

Beecher, Roxana, tribute to, 

24; recollections of, 47; influenced 
by memory of, 67, 554; opinion of, 

from her letters, 128. Beecher, 

Rev. T. K., reminiscence by, 90, 

138. Belgian court, experiences 

at, 404. — — Bible, early analysis of, 
137, 192; on method of reading, 

642. — Birth of, 37, 41. Birds, 

love for, 615, 616. Blaine, J. G., 

opinion of, 576; refuses to support, 
577, threatened for refusal, 579; 



INDEX. 



697 



election of, on probable result of, 

579. Books, on buying, 648. 

Boston, bells of, amazed at, 83; 
ships and Navy-Yard in, enthusiasm 
over, 84; on juvenile feuds of, 85; 
chief in, of " follow-your-leader," 
85; cannon-ball, purloins a, 87; 
life at, in boyhood, 0,0-92; moral in- 
fluence of, bad, 92; joins Bowdoin 
vSt. Church, 98; receives call to, 
216; defence at, on scandal rumors, 

535- Bowen, Henry C, hostility 

of, 490, 492; action of, in Tilton's 
charge against Mr. Beecher, 511, 
charge published, 513, 514; on re- 
newed charges of, 542, 543. 



Brattleboro, Vt., lecture at, 130-132. 

Brice, Pomona, help for, 293. 

Brooklyn, declines reception by 

Common Council of, 672. Brown, 

John, sermon on, 301. Brussels, 

visit to, in 1863, 403. Buchanan, 

Pres., on administration of, 305; 

on fast-day of, 307. Budington, 

Rev. W., church of, seeks to heal 
dissension in, 524; letter to, on its 
protest, 526. Callers, daily, de- 
scription of, 657. Calvinism, 

early teaching in, 70, 77. Camp, 

life in, on dangers of, 319. Cate- 
chism, a failure at, 65. Charac- 
ter, moulding of, 44, 81 ; at seven- 
teen, 108, 112 ; during college 
course, 113-116 ; in manhood, 258 

Charity, on, 352 ; demands on 

his, 658. Charleston, S. C, in- 
vited to deliver address at (1865), 
449; Stanton's despatch concerning, 
450; address at, 451-454; purpose 

of, ingoingto, 460. Children, love 

for, 639 ; a method of whipping, 
640 ; his own, on newspaper report 
as to, 356 ; training of, 640 ; justice 
tempered by love, 641 ; advice to, on 
self-helpfulness, 641, on religion, on 
Bible-reading, 642, on study, 642, 
643, on health and on duty, 643, on 
choosing profession, 643, on literary 

style, 644. Chimes, church, first 

experience with, 83. "Choosing 

good parents," on, 17. Christian- 
ity, On power of, to crush slavery, 

268. Christian Union, in control 

of, 491. Church, going to, when 

a boy, 59, promises made, 60, ex- 
periences at, 61 ; on growth of a, 
227, 483 ; on proper work of a, 

540. Church-bell, adventure with 

a, 60. Church-membership, on, 



362. -Cincinnati, O., family life at, 

140 ; drives off his father's cow, 141 ; 
constable at, a, 142 ; "family meet- 
ing" at, 142 ; Journal of, editor of, 

I4I« Cleveland, Pres., remarks 

on slanders against, 577 ; support of, 
reasons for, 577-580 ; on adminis- 
tration of, 587. Cleveland letters: 

invited as chaplain to convention, 
461 ; reply to invitation, 465, public 
clamor against, 462, remarks on, 
474. 475 J Tyng's, Dr., letter on, 469, 
reply, 470 ; Storrs's, Dr., letter on, 
471 ; Mr. Beecher's second letter, 
472, effect of, 477, Storrs, Dr., on, 
477 ; assailed by Independent for, 

501 • Coffee, effect of, 652. 

Colors, how affected by, 649-651. 

Compromise measures, article 

on, 236-238 ; Missouri Compromise, 
on repeal of, 273-277 ; appeal to 
ministers as to, 275, 276 ; on offer of, 
in i860, 306 ; in general, on, 421 ; 

on proposal for, in 1864, 445. 

Congress, on proposed nomination 
to, 360. Congregational Associa- 
tion, resigns from, 567, 568 ; state- 
ment to, 568 ; remarks on criticisms 
of his action, 569. Congregation- 
al Church, estimate of, 610. Con- 
spiracy against, beginning of, 494 ; 
statement on, 495-520, effect of pub- 
lication of, 531 ; investigating com- 
mittee, calls for an, 499, 528, action 
°f. 5 2 9. 530 J publicity of, motives 
for avoiding, 504, 519, 531, 544; 
Eagle, card in, as to Woodhull let- 
ters, 522 ; demands production of 
any letters, 529 ; letter to, of Pres. 
Porter, 532 ; on malignity of con- 
spirators, 546, 553 ; on prompt de- 
mands for investigation, 547 ; on 
publishing of, 548 ; cost of, 549, 565, 
Shearman's, T., part in, 549 ; reflec- 
tions on, 557 ; hostility of press in, 
558 ; nervous strain from, 558 ; Eng- 
lish sympathy during, 668. Con- 
scientiousness of, how developed, 

65. Controversy, harsh, advice 

against, 244. Conversion of, 98 ; 

recollections of, 590.- Correspon- 
dence of, how conducted, 658. 

Courage of, physical, in killing mad 

dog, 664. Country, intense love 

for, 416, 460. Courtship of, 121- 

127, on false reports as to effects of, 

129 ; Saxon, description of, 127. 

Cowper, William, on style of, 644. 
Creditors, on duty to, 354.—— 



6 9 8 



INDEX. 



Cunard steamers, on bigotry upon, 
350 ; falsehood as to, charged with, 

351. D.D., declination of title of, 

391. Daniel, Samuel, poem of, 

134. Darkness, early spiritual, 

78-81, 119-121, 604; darkness dis- 
persed, 155. Davis, Jefferson, on 

proposed hanging of , 458. Death, 

impending, feelings of, 507, 508, 516, 
556 ; of his brother George, 204 ; of 
his son George, 205 ; of his daughter 
" Caty," 224 ; of his twin sons, 357 ; 
of three nephews. 372 ; no fear of, 
681, 682 ; remarks on, 682 ; his 
death, 676, wishes concerning, 
681, private service at, 677, ser- 
vice in Plymouth, 678 ; burial of, 

680 ; grave of, 680. Debate, 

early power in, 113, 114. De- 

nominationalism, on, 611. "De- 
pravity, total," hatred of phrase, 380. 

Divine, the, early strivings for, 

77, 78, 100. Doctrine, early 

knowledge of, 163, 165, 604 ; com- 
mended for, 612. Douglass, Fred, 



invitation to, to Plymouth, 248.- 

Dramatic power of, early, 96. 

Ecclesiastical machinery, dislike of, 
I 5 2 » !53» OOD - Edinburgh, Scot- 
land, speech at, in 1863, 419-422. 

Editor, on power of an, 321 ; 

editorial articles, sources of, 325, 
characteristic features of, 325, 326. 

Edmonson sisters, in purchase 

of, 292. Elections of 1884 : 

distrusts Mr. Blaine, 576 ; en- 
dorses Mr. Cleveland, 577, 578, re- 
marks on, 578, answer to remon- 
strance on, 579, 580, answer to 
threat, 580 ; active work in, 580 ; re- 
view of, 584-586 ; excitement in, on 

calm after, 586. Ellsworth, Col., 

on death of, 313. Elocution, how 

acquired, 95, 96 ; gesture in, a 
favorite, 186. Emancipation, de- 
mands, 331, 332, 333, 335 ; Procla- 
mation of, article on, 336 ; God's 

will, resigned now to, 337, 338. 

England, on war with, 322, 412 ; de- 
parture for, in 1850, 339 ; impres- 
sions of Warwick Castle, Kenil- 
worth, 340, of Caesar's Tower, Guy's 
Tower, 341, of Stratford-on-Avon, 
342, 344, of Oxford, Bodleian Li- 
brary, 344, 345 ; Episcopal services 
in, description of, 342-344 ; return 
from, 349. Departure for, in 1863, 
396, motives for, 396, 397 ; on sym- 
pathy in, for South, 399, 400 ; arrival 



in, declines to speak, 400 ; Congre- 
gational clergy of, strictures on, 
401 ; London, first speech in, 401, 
402, second speech in, 432-436 ; 
United States, on English dread of, 
402, 403 ; consents to speak in, 406 ; 
requests for speeches in, 407 ; Man- 
chester, speech at, 408-414 ; offen- 
sive utterances against, denies, 416 ; 
Liverpool, speech in, 422-432, pla- 
carded in, enmity of press of, 422 ; 
speeches in, effect of, 436, 441 ; 
Storrs, Dr., on the work in, 437; im- 
pressions from the visit, 438-441 ; 
New York papers on his work in, 
441 ; welcomes delegates from, to 
Boston Council, 613. Departure 
for, in 1886, 665 ; friends' enthu- 
siastic farewell, 666 ; retrospect on 
landing, 666, 668 ; likened in, to 
Gladstone, 669 ; preaching in Lon- 
don, 669 ; Westminster Abbey, 
visit to, 669 ; his work in, 670, 671 ; 
public meetings in, on customs at, 
670 ; address in City Temple, 671 ; 
return from, 672. English-speak- 
ing peoples, claimed by all, 26. 

English classics, love for, 113, 114, 

133 ; criticisms on, 145, 146. 

Episcopal Church, impressed by ser- 
vice of,' 343 ; on liturgy of, 370 ; 
charged with disrespect towards, 
371 ; vision of sermon in a, 377 ; 

tribute to, 610. Evil, method of 

combating, 194, 195, 217, 218, 219, 

355. Evolution, sermons on, 567; 

belief in, 608, 609. Exhortation 

in social meetings, on, 353. Ex- 
temporaneous speech, early aptitude 

for, 113, 173. Farm, work on, 

beginning of, 57, 617 ; knowledge of 
farm-work, 199 ; on one use of a, 
360 ; at Peekskill, 383, 619-638 ; 

work on, as a recreation, 617. 

Fishing, first experience at, 31 ; a 
confession as to, 614-616. Flow- 
ers, love for, 96, 616, 626, brings 
him a rebuke, 96 ; on abundance of, 
392 ; pulpit, on use in, 393 ; at Bos- 
cobel, 626, 627 ; how influenced by, 

627. Freedom of speech, on, 243, 

245 ; on stifling of, in Kansas, 284. 

Fremont, on marriage of, 290. 

Fugitive Slave Law, articles on, 236- 
238, 240-244. Future punish- 
ment, on doctrine of, 608. Gaelic 

blood in, source of, 18. Garrison, 

William L., estimate of, 267. 

Glasgow, Scotland, speech in, in 



INDEX. 



699 



1863, 414-419. Gospel, must 

preach it as revealed to him, 154.- 



Gospels, an analysis of, 192 ; broad 
study of, 596. Government, di- 
vine, views on, 326 ; church, views 

on, 609. Graduates, advice to, 

173. Grammar, youthful defini- 
tion in, 75. Hall, Rev. Chas. H., 

deep friendship for, 677. Ham- 
mers, on animation of, 3S9. Har- 
rington, Moody, helped by^ 120. 



Health of , how founded, 31; impair- 
ed in 1S49, 339. in 1863, 39c; man- 
agement of, 652; on duty as to. 65 1. 
•Heaven, digging to find, 49, 



"Homeward Bound, "liking for, 379. 

Home-life of, 639. Honors, 

worldly, compared with ministry, 592. 

Hopkinton, Mass., teaching at, 

129, 130. Horseback-riding, ear- 
ly attempt at, 55. Horticulture, 

love for, 96; studies in, 198; work in, 
199; as an alterative, 394, 395 



Humorousness, early, 115; some ex- 
amples of, 75, 76, 116, 118, 122, 

124. Hymns: see Music, p. 700. 

Imposed upon, remarks on 

being, 659. Independent, con- 
tributor to, 328, 488; editor of, 321, 
488; Salutatory, 321; editorials in, 
in 1862, 322-336; assailed by, for 
Cleveland letters, 469, 491; resigns 
editorship, 490; severs connection 
with, 491. Indiana Farmer, ed- 
itor of, 182, 185, 197 Indian- 
apolis, called to, 179, accepts call, 
180; recollections of parishioners, 
181-187; his churches at, 181, 183, 
207; his residences at, 182, 202; 
personal appearance at, 183; a re- 
fractory brother, 184; popularity at, 
186, 203; an imitative tailor, 187; 
revivals at, sermon before Presby- 
tery, 189; work in other towns, 190, 
193; labors in, against crime, 194, 
195; sermons at, on slavery, 195-197; 
painting his own house, 202; his 
class of girls at, 203; helps at kite- 
making, 204; recollections of, 206- 
209; tub, adventure with, 208; de- 
parture from, 216; success at, 
charged to plagiarism, 218; garden 

work at, 617. Infidelity, early 

victory over, 74. Infidels at Cin- 
cinnati, on the toast of, 381. In- 
fluences on, early, 65, 66; of 
Charles Smith, 66; of Esther Beech- 
er, 68; of his father. 68, 69; in Bos 
ton, 83, S4. Information, early 



desire for, 10S. Instruction, 

catechetical, soon forgotten, 69. 

Investigation, habit of, how ac- 
quired, 32. Johnson, Pres., let- 
ter to, on reconstruction, 460; stric- 
ture on, 470, 471; accepts policy of, 
473. Journal of Commerce, criti- 
cism on, 334. Journals of, ob- 
ject in keeping, 144, 145; some ex- 
tracts from, 109-112, 139, 144-150, 
I0 9> 339. 34°- Judiciary, cor- 
rupt (1867-71), thunders against, 

57 2 . 573- Kansas, on emigration 

to, 284; sends arms to, 2S3, 286; on 
the contest in, 283, 301; strictures 
on Administration, 302 Know- 
ledge, art of retaining, 647. Kos- 
suth, Louis, on the visit of, 256; 

gift of Hungarian bracelet, 352. 

Labor, physical, views on, 199; in 
the North and the South contrasted, 

418. Lane Seminary, influence 

of, 137; life at, 154; graduates from, 

157. Latin, result of studies in, 

88. Law, on obedience to, 241, 

-Lawrenceburg, called to, 



242.- 

157; removes to, plans, 158; church 
duties at, 159, 172; success and 
salary at, 173; housekeeping at, 174, 
175; Thomas's, Rev. J. H., remin- 
iscences, 176; influence at, 177; on 
a gift of clothing, 178, 179; fare- 
well sermon at, 180. Laws lack- 
ing public sentiment, on, 459. 

Leader, as a popular, 325. Lec- 
tures of, his first, 130-132; at Cin- 
cinnati in 1861, 309; during Rebel- 
lion, 319; politics and religion in, 
390; purpose of, 564; field of, 564; 
proceeds of, how spent, 564; omit- 
ted during Conspiracy, 564; resump- 
tion of, reasons for, 564, 565; de- 
monstrations at, 565, remarks on, 
566; in Boston, reception at, 565; 
"West, reception in, 566; Louisville, 
reception at, 566; first before Yale 
students, how prepared, 59S; ex- 
penses in lecture-tours, 653. 

" Lectures to Young Men," purpose 

of, 200; publishing of, 201. Left 

to himself in boyhood, 59. 

Lenox, Mass., farm at, 359, 61S; 
work on, 360; relinquished, 372. 

Leopold, King, presented to, 

403, 404; advice to, as to Mexico, 

405: Letter of, an early, 50. 

Levee, adventures at a, in. 

Library of, how founded, 131, 133; 
contents of, in 1835, T 5°» m ^ ater 



700 



INDEX. 



life. 646, 647; a working library, 

647; remark on, 647. License, 

obtains a, 157. " Life of Christ," 

first volume of, completed, 480, 
674; second volume of, work on, 
°73> 674; prophetic remark concern- 
ing, 674. Lincoln, Pres., esti- 
mate of, work for, 304, 305 ; on call 
of, for troops, 327, 328; on vacilla- 
tion of, in 1862, 329, 332, 333; on 
duty of, 331; on Emancipation 
Proclamation of, 336; on Southern 
commission of, in 1864, 446; tribute 
to, 447, 456; death of, 454, remarks 
on, 446, 455. Lind, Jenny, de- 
fence of, 351; reminiscence of, 351, 

352. Liquor, on selling of, by 

Christians, 354; use of, 652, 653; on 
need of, except as medicine, 653. 

Litchfield, Conn., early life in, 

31-33; visit to, in 1856, 35-38; 
reminiscences by people of, 36, 37; 
winter at, 62, 63; North Pole situ- 
ated in, 63; visit to, in 1857, 373. 

Liturgy, on church, 370, 371. 

Liverpool, Eng., arrival in, in 

1863, 400; talk in, a, 401; speech 
in, 422-432; placarded in, 422, 426; 
threatened with violence in, 423; 
risk in speaking in, 423; subject of 
speech, 423; reception at the hall, 

424, 425. London, Eng., first 

speech in, in 1S63, 401; second 
speech in, 432-436; voice in, threat- 
ened failure of, 432, 433; success in, 
436; preaches in, in 1886, 669. 



Love, to enemies, on, 311-313; 
Christian, better than logic, 380; for 
friends, 658, "slopping over," re- 
marks on, 658, 659. McClellan, 

on defeat of, 328; criticism on, 331. 

Manchester, Eng., reception in, 

in 1863, 408, 409; subject of speech 
in, 409; speech in, 410-414; vic- 
tory in, 410; effect of speech, 

414. Manliness and power, 

source of, 21. Marriage of, 

170, 171 ; of his daughter, 388,- 



Mathematics, backwardness in, 94 ; 

opinion of, 114. Matteawan, N. 

Y., residence at, 372, 618. Medi- 
cal schools, views on, 353, 354-- 



Memory of, where defective, 647. 
Militia, on need of moral influ- 
ence on, 661 ; as a member of, 660- 

663. Ministers, classification of, 

149 ; should be joyous, 150 ; on duty 
of, as to slavery, 248-252, as to war- 
tax, 324, in public affairs, 360, as to 



preaching against evil practices, 361 ; 
spiritual office of, 370. See Preach- 
er, p. 701. Mitchel, John, pro- 
phecy on, 266. Monarchies, ex- 
citements in, contrasted with United 

States, 585. Moral principles, 

sacrifices for, 312. Moulton, 

Frank, confidence in, 496, 497 ; let- 
ter to, June, 1873, 515 ; on letter 
from, 518 ; wife of, opposition to, 

560. Mount Pleasant Institute, 

enters, 93 ; mathematics at, 94, 100; 
elocution at, 95 ; recollections of W. 
P. Fitzgerald and J. W. Lovell, 94, 
95 ; chaplain of, rebukes H. W. 
Beecher, 96 ; life at, 97 ; studies at, 
97, 100, 101 ; religious experiences 
at, 97-102 ; Bible work at, 99, 100 ; 
troubles at, 102 ; on card-playing at, 
102 ; visit to, in 1849, 107 ; his char- 
acter while at Institute, 108. 

Mourning, on outward symbols of, 
676 ; Prussian queen, on tomb of a, 

677. Music, early work in, 92, 

124, 138, 139, 144 ; church music, 
on old methods of, 363, reform in, 
365; "Plymouth Collection," com- 
pilation of, 363-366 ; hymns, views 
on, 366, 367 ; music-writers, ac- 
quaintance with, 368,369 ; at prayer- 
meeting, 378 ; organ, on value of, 

600. Name of, its source, 41 ; 

names bestowed upon, 613. Na- 
tion above party, 577. Nature, 

love for, 32, 33, 59, 74, 96, acquired 
by study, 394 ; religious impressions 
connected with, 77 ; study of, for 

preaching, 596, 614, 615. Navy, 

American, on moral defect in, 355. 

Negroes, feeling toward, how 

influenced, 66 ; fugitive, on help to, 
240, 241, 323, on return of, 252 ; 
on ostracism of, 247 ; on treatment 
of, by omnibuses, 247, 248 ; on free- 
dom being given to eight, 263 ; treat- 
ment of, at North, 303 ; on slaves 
liberated by army, 323 ; on benefits 
to, of restoration of South, 463, 467, 
473. Newell, Constantine. affec- 
tion for, 104-106. New England 

stock, a product of, 25, 26. " No- 
ble," anecdote of, 290. North- 
bridge, Mass., teaching at, 130. 

Northern merchants, on boycott of, 
247. Norwich, N. Y., impres- 
sions of, 389. " Norwood," quot- 
ed, 88 ; published, 479. Observa- 
tion, habit of, how gained, 32. 

Optimism, definition of, 585, 






INDEX. 



70I 



Oratorical powers, imperceptible in 

youth, 70. Ordinances, church, 

view of, 609. Ordination, exam- 
ination for, 161, 165, 166 ; Old 
School, refuses to subscribe to, 161, 
162, 166; ordained, 163, 167.— 
Original sin, on doctrine of, 607. 



Orthodoxy, definition of, 606 ; on 

tests of, 606, 607. Paris, visit to, 

in 1850, 346 ; art-galleries of. how af- 
fected by, 346-348, 349 ; Vicksburg, 
hears of fall of , while visiting, 405, 
effect on Southerners in, 406. Par- 
ker controversy, peacemaker in, 
259 ; results, 260 ; letters on, 261, 
262. Parker, Theodore, con- 
demned for associating with, 380 ; 

tribute to, 381. Party, political, 

on blind subservience to, 577 ; on 

redemption of a, 581. Pastorates, 

short, opposed to. 180. Patriotism 

of, where nurtured, 35 ; strength of, 

416. Paul, St., compared with, 

588,589. Peace (1861), denoun- 
ces terms of, 310, 311. Peek- 
skill, N. Y., farm at, 383 ; descrip- 
tion of, 619, 620; cottage at, 620 ; 
improvements made, old apple-tree, 
621, 622; products of, 623; early 
crops at. rivalry over, 623, 624 ; 
Turner, T. J., outwitted by Mr. 
Beecher, 624, thrifty nature of, 626; 
flowers at, 626; his "work" at, 
627, 628 ; new house at, 628-630, 
chimney of, as a look-out, 629, 
• decoration of, 630 ; trees and shrubs 
at, 630, 632 ; benefits derived from, 
632 ; insects at, gratitude to, 632, 
634 ; fowls at, 634, 635, the patent 
hatcher, 635, 636; cattle at, 636 ; 
bees at, 636, 637 ; dogs at, 637, re- 
marks on "Tommy," 638. Per- 
severance, thoughts on, 147. Per- 
sonal attack, averse to, 354. Pes- 
simism, definition of, 585. Phil- 
lips, Wendell, in Brooklyn, work 

for, 246. Phrenology, acceptance 

of, 130; lecturing on, 138, 144. 

"Pinky," buying freedom of, 294- 
297. Plurality of wives of ances- 
tors, remark on, 20. Plymouth 

Church, invited to come to, his an- 
swer, 210-213 I called to, 214 ; ac- 
cepts call, reasons, 214, 215 ; failure 
at, predicted, 217; first sermon at, 
218 ; slavery, labors at, against, 219- 
221 ; installed, 221 ; success at, 222, 
225 ; revivals at, work in, 222, 375, 
391 ; prayer at, sample of a, 228 , 



prayer-meeting, lecture, sociable at, 
229-231 ; policy towards, 232 ; re- 
trospect, a (1863), 337 ; prayer-meet- 
ings at, daily, 376, influence of, 
377 ; on income of, 379 ; organ at. 
on a new, 382 ; on flowers in, 393 ; 
on Silver Wedding of, remarks at, 
481-484; generosity of, in Conspir- 
acy. 5 5 J tribute to, 578 ; result of 
work in, 601 ; welcome at, in 1886, 
672 ; funeral services at, 678 ; me- 
morial service at, 680. "Ply- 
mouth Collection," history of, 363- 
366 ; terms of publication of, 364 ; 
on alleged omission of Watts's 

hymns from, 368. Political secret 

societies, on, 362. Politics, in the 

army, indignant at, 444 ; on honesty 

and morality in, 583. Prayer, 

early love for, 97, 100 ; sample of, 
228 ; on extemporaneous, 371 ; at 
prayer-meeting, 378 ; reply to re- 
quest for copy of a, 656. Prayer- 
meetings, method of conducting, 

376, 377 ; on laughter in, 377 

Preacher, his rank as a, 588 ; quali- 
ties as a, 589 ; parental faith his first 
incentive, 590 ; early training-school, 
590 ; temperament as a, 591 ; high 
estimate of a, 592 ; early life as a, a 
happy period, 593 ; call to a, two 
essentials to, 594 ; discouraged, ad- 
vice to a, 595 ; should consecrate 
every gift, 595. See Ministers, p. 

700. Preaching, beginnings of, 

130 ; first in the West, 149 ; natural- 
ism in, 164 ; to preach Christ only, 
167, 178, 193, 227 ; fiist real, at In: 
dianapolis, 187 ; versatility in, 193 ; 
courage in, incidents of, 194, 195 ; 
means of relief from, 198 ; spirit- 
uality in, one source of, 391; estimate 
of, 588 ; on future scope of, 592; 
theory of, 595 ; involuntary prepara- 
tion for, 596 ; influence of his, on 
theology, 602 ; manner in, an ex- 
ample, 605 ; preparation for, 597— 

600, 655. Precious stones, love 

for, soothing effect of, 649-651 ; relief 
derived from, at Liverpool, 650; rea- 
son for love of, 650, 651. Pride, 

early struggles with, 102. Private 

Journal of, at Amherst, log ; con- 
tents of, 109, no. Profanity, on a 

case of, 642. Prussian queen, on 

tomb of a, 677. Pulpit, on free- 
dom of, 248-252 ; duty of, as to war- 
tax, 324, in public affairs. 360, 361 ; 
as a popular educator, 362; prepara-* 



J02 



INDEX, 



tion for, 655. "Puritan peniten- 
tiary," not born in a, 57. Rats, 



at Litchfield, description of, 63. 

Rebellion, on enlistment of son for, 
310 ; interest of, in organizing mili- 
tia, 314 ; sacrifices for, 316 ; Four- 
teenth Regiment, equipment of, 316, 
sermon to, 317 ; Sixty-seventh Re- 
giment, equipment of, 317, 488 ; 
Union soldier, on duty of, 317, 318 ; 
Bull Run defeat, on, 350 ; on Ad- 
ministration's inactivity and mis- 
management, 324, 325, 328, 329, on 
duty of, 330, 331 ; God's leadership 
in, prayer for, 332 ; Union success 
in, confident of, 333 ; Confederacy 
and Administration contrasted, 335 ; 
state of, in 1863, 397 ; enormous 
army, should be crushed by an, 
443 ; troops in, should be no dis- 
tinction between, 443 ; end of, joy 
at, 451, 455 ; brought on by South- 
ern politicians, 454. Reconstruc- 
tion of South, on President's duty in 
(1862), 333 ; speech on, 458 ; letter 
on, to Pres. Johnson, 460 ; on bene- 
fits of, to colored race, 463 ; on 
military government in, 465, 466. 

Recreation, mental, how taken, 

394, 395. Religion, meaning of, 

642. Religious experience of, at 

Litchfield, 65-69, 76-81; at Mt. 
Pleasant, 97-102; at Amherst, 119- 
121; at Lane, 154, 155; spiritual ex- 
altation (1857), 373 ; influence of 

early, 604. Republican party, 

work for, in 1856, 289, in i860, 
304, 305, in 1864, 571 ; esteem of, 
471 ; in sympathy with (1866), 473 ; 
favors election of members of, to 
Congress (1866), 475; corruption in, 
labors against, 574 ; reasons for not 
working for, 581-583; still a member 

of, 584. Republics, on political 

excitement in, 583. Reputation, 

on posthumous, 557. Responsibi- 
lity, on individual, 219. Retort, 

quickness of, 252, 253. Revivals, 

at Litchfield, 81 ; at Mt. Pleasant, 
98 ; at Amherst, 119 ; at Terre 
Haute, 19T, 192 ; at Plymouth, 222, 
231, 391 ; method of conducting, 

375-378. Romance of, an early, 

103. Ruskin, John, tribute to, 

394. Sadness, a tendency to, 345, 

346, 500, 556. Sailor, on needs 

of the, 355. St. Louis Library 

Association, asked to lecture before, 
389 ; matters to be avoided, his re- 



ply, 390. Salisbury, Conn., on 

beauties of, 356. Salvation, on, 

379. Sarah — , buying freedom 

of, 298-300. Saviour, vision of 

sufferings of, 377. Scepticism, a 

touch of, 154, 164. Scholar, de- 
sires to be a, 593. School life, 

beginning of, 49, 50 ; experiences at 
district school, 51-53, at Mr. Brace's 
and Mr. Langdon's, 72, 74, at Cath- 
arine Beecher's, amusing incidents, 
75, 76 ; progress in his studies, 88 ; 

at Mt. Pleasant, 93-108. Schools, 

the two Presbyterian, views on, 

163. Scott, Walter, early critique 

on, 145. Sea-life, determines on, 

89 ; to study for it, 90, 93 ; design 
abandoned, 99. Seasons, allego- 
rical view of, 616. Sectarianism, 

on, 611, 612. Sermons, illustra- 
tions for, how acquired, 32 ; his 
earliest, 130; first Western, 149; 
first at Lawrenceburg, 173 ; record 
book of, 179, 192 ; at Indianapolis, 
186, 187 ; modelled on Apostles', 
188 ; proper aim of, 188 ; sermon on 
" Prodigal Son," 189 ; first sermon 
in Plymouth, 218, outline of, 229 ; 
issued in book form, 479 ; Thanks- 
giving, custom in, 584 ; note-books 
on, 596 ; method of preparing, 
597-600, 655, remarks on, 655 ; the 
one at Charleston, 599, at Stamford, 
599 ; method of delivering, 600 ; 
fruits of, 602 ; must be delivered 
immediately, 656 ; trial sermon, 

687. Seward, Wm. H., opinion 

°U 3°5« Shakspere, early criti- 
cism on, 146.— — "Shining Shore," 
a favorite with, 366, 379. Sick- 
ness, thoughts on, 147 ; his final, 

675. Slavery, work done against, 

at Amherst, 119, at Indianapolis, 
185, 195-197 ; course on, denned, 
217-220, 242 ; on Church's timidity 
towards, 221 ; Fugitive Slave Law, 
articles on, 236-238, 240-244 ; lead- 
er against, an acknowledged, 244 ; 
pulpit labor against, defence of, 
248-252 ; tenacity of anti-slavery, 
on cause of, 257, instrumentalities 
for, use of, 266 ; Constitution, bal- 
lot, Church, as forces against, 267 ; 
Christianity against, on power of, 
268 ; battle against, religious ele- 
ment in, 269, 270 ; on treatment of, 
303, 331 ; military question, a, 331 ; 
system of, requires ignorance, 417. 
Sleep, habits as to, 654. 



INDEX. 



703 



South, not safe to visit, 426 ; on 
reconstruction of, 453, 458, 461 ; on 
kindness to people of (1865), 454 ; 
on effect of exclusion of, 459, 468, 
473 ; affection for, 460 ; faith in 
honor of, 463 ; on restoration of 
States of, 465-468, Northern fear 
of, .466, 467 ; to be effected by 
Republican party, 477 ; on re- 
sults to, of elections of 1884, 587 ; 

mediation for, 612. Speculative, 

early aptitude for the, 78, 79. 

Spiritualism, disbelief in, 363. 



Sports, youthful, superiority in, 85, 
108. Stanton, Edwin M., en- 
couraging note to, reply, 447 ; re- 
quested by, to go to Charleston, 449 ; 
telegram from, on Sheridan's suc- 
cess, 450 Stockton, Coi , recom 

mends to Lincoln, 443. Storrs, 

Dr. R. S., reasons for not confiding 
in, 520 ; attempted reconciliation 

with, 561. Stowe, Rev. Calvin 

E., indebtedness to, 137 ; a joke on, 
141. Strength of paternal ances- 
try of, 19. Studies, in youth, 

backward in, 70, 74, 102. Study, 

on wrong method of, 643. Style, 

literary, remarks on, 644. Sum- 
ner-Brooks affair, speech on, 287 ; 
article on, 288. Sunday, influen- 
ces of, when a boy, 62. Synod 

meeting, description of, 152. 

Tasks of, in boyhood, 64. Taxes 

for war, on, 323 ; Christian's duty 

as to, 324. Tea, effect of, 652. 

-Temperance, early work in, 130, 



138, 144, 147 ; in Lawrenceburg, 
185; "teetotal" at Oxford, Eng., 
345 ; to his daughter, on practice of, 
3S4 ; use of liquors as medicine, 

652, 653. " Temple Melodies," 

compilation of 363 ; name omitted 
from title of, 364. Terre Haute, 



Ind., reminiscence of, 190-192. 

Theologian, as a, 602, 603 ; esti- 
mate of, 603. Theology, pro- 
poses to find a universal, 570 ; his 
influence on, 604 ; theological dis- 
putes, hatred of, 604, 605 ; dislike 
of, reason for, 606 ; future, on the, 
609. Thirteenth Regiment, ac- 
cepts chaplaincy of, 660 ; sword a 
source of trouble, 662 ; military or- 
ders, experience with, 662, 663 ; 
title in, 663. Tides, youthful de- 
finition of, 76. Tilton, Theodore, 

affection for, 489, 500 ; first charge 
of 1 493 I called on to leave Brooklyn 



by, 494, 503 ; efforts to reclaim, 
495, 497 ; opinion of, to Bowen, 
503 ; self-accusations of unintention- 
al wrong to, 505 ; moral conduct of, 
deceived in, 509 ; urges him to 
break with Mrs. Woodhull, 510; on 
bad traits of, 516 ; promise to, as to 
Mrs. Tilton, 517 ; payment to, of 
$5,000, 519 ; openly charged by, 527; 
charge chai ged by, 532; civil suit 

by, 533- Tilton, Mrs. T., advice 

asked by, as to separation, 502; let- 
ter to, Feb. 17, 1871, 507; letter to, 

on Woodhull scandal, 513. 

Tools, readiness with, 64 

Travel, foreign, religion weakened 

by, 384. Trinity, on doctrine of, 

607. Tripartite agreement, part 

in, 512; honored by him alone, 520. 

Trouble, on surmounting, 374; 

how affected by, 499. Trouting, 

letter on, 357. Trust in God, on, 

379; how strengthened, 616, 617. 
Truth, desire for, 212. 



"Tutor's Delight," the, i)6. 

Tweed frauds, denunciations of, 572. 

Twin sons of, birth of, 352; 

death of, 357. Undenominational 

spirit of, 163, 167, 227, 483, 611. 

Unitarian reaction in Massachusetts, 
on the, 83; Sabbath-school, on ostra- 
cism of a, 355, 356. Vicksburg 

and Gettysburg, on victories of, 405, 

406. War, views on, 312, 313, 

398; Christians in, on bearing of, 

314; with England, on, 322. 

Welsh blood in, source of, 39. 

White Mountains, summer services 

in, 660 W r idowerhood, possible, 

remark on, 20. Woman, reve- 
rence for, 554. Writing-paper, 

dislike of foreign, 387. Young, 

fondness for, 184, 185, 203; " Lec- 
tures to Young Men," J99. 

Beecher, Mrs. H. W., an accident to, 
385, determination of, 386; Beech- 
er's, Henry W., letter to, on his 
health, 653; Lawrenceburg, de- 
scription of pastorate at, 172, of 
housekeeping at, 174; retrospect by, 
of Mr. Beecher's youth, 121-127; 
wedding of, 170, journey to West, 
171. 

Beecher, John, a pioneer of New 
Haven Colony, 19. 

Beecher. Joseph, reminiscence of, 19; 
strength of, 20. 

Beecher, Nathaniel, reminiscence of, 
19; strength of, 20. 



704 



Index, 



Beecher, Rev. Lyman, affection of, for 

his wife, 26. Beecher, Roxana, 

opinion of, 24, 26. Birth and 

childhood of, 18. Boston, re- 
moval to, 82. Character of, 17, 

26, 27. Jnildren of, their regi- 
men, 46; tulip-bulbs, adventure 
with, 47; at their mother's death, 
49; some amusements of, the cat's 
funeral, 56; treatment of, by their 
father, 57; fishing trip, a, spoiled, 
58; teaching of, by their father 
58; father's spirit, influenced by, 68. 
— —Cincinnati, household at, 138- 



140; family meeting at, 142. 

College, preparation for, 19. 

Courtship of, 26. Death of, H. 

■Duelling, 
27- 



W. Beecher on, 681. 

effect of sermon on, 

East Hampton, life and labors at, 

27 ; departure from, 29. Farm 

life, disgusted with, 18. Finan- 
cial difficulties, faith under, 117 



Indomitable spirit of, infused into 

his children, 68, 69. Kindness of, 

abused, remark on, 659. Lane 

Seminary, president of, 136, 160 ; 
instruction at, method of, 137 ; her- 
esy, charged with, 151, 160; union 
of churches, wish for, 160. Let- 
ters of, to Roxana Foote, 26, 27 



Litchfield, called to, 29 ; dwelling 
at, 38, 62, rats in, 63 ; household at, 
38, H. W. Beecher on, 553 ; ideal 
home, an, 40 ; labors at, made a 
mental stimulus, 58 ; visit to, in 
1857, 373. Marriage of, to Rox- 
ana Foote, 27 ; to Harriet Porter, 
53. Missionary societies in Con- 
necticut formed by, 42. New 

School, battle for, 151. Ortho- 
doxy, zeal for, 82. Plymouth 

Church, at a revival in, 376. Re- 
ligious temperament of, 26. 

Shrewdness of, in H. W. Beecher's 
sea project, 90. Society for Pre- 
vention of Vice in Connecticut 
formed by, 42. Synod, modera- 
tor of, 152. Temperance, action 

on, 42. Unitarian reaction, pro- 
test against, 82. United States in 

1813, remarks on, 41. Wood- 
spell, the yearly, 58. 
Beecher, Roxana, accomplishments of, 

23. Ancestry of, 21, 22 

Beecher's, H. W., estimate of, 128 ; 
her influence on, 67, 554. Court- 
ship of, 26. Death of. 48. 

East Hampton, L. I., life in, 27. 



Education of, how acquired, 

23. Episcopal Church, member 

of, 23, 24. Letters of, to Lyman 

Beecher, 26. Love of, for her 

husband, 26. Parents of, loyal to 

king, 23. Personal characteris- 
tics of, 23, 24. Recollections of, 

47 Religious temperament of, 

24, 26. School of , in East Hamp- 
ton, 28. Science, interest in, 40. 

Trials of, some, 40. 

Beecher, Rev. Thomas K , reminiscen- 
ces by, of Henry and Charles, 90, 
138. 

Benton, Lot, Lyman Beecher brought 
up by, 18. 

Big Bantam Lake (Litchfield), 31. 

Blaine, James G., H. W. Beecher 
on, 576, 577- 

Blake, G. Faulkner, in ransom of 
slaves, 2>;4. 

Boscobel — see Peekskill. 

Boston, Mass., bells of, 83 ; Beecher's, 
H. W., life in, 90-92, adventure with 
cross woman of, 118, rumors in, 
against, 534, 546, rumors refuted, 535; 
reception in, at lecture, 565; Beech- 
er, Lyman, removes to, 82, dwelling 
at, 85 ; feuds of, juvenile, 85 ; 
Navy- Yard of, H. W. Beecher's en- 
thusiasm over, 84, purloins cannon- 
ball from, 87 ; ships of, impress H. 
W. Beecher, 84 ; sport of, a juve- 
nile, 85. 

Bowen, Henry C, H. W. Beecher's 
dispute with, as to accounts, 489, 
scandalous hints concerning, 490, 
hatred of, intensified by resignation, 
492, bitter enemy to, 494, promises 
support to, 504, renews charges 
against, 542, proposed committee 
on, 543 ; card of, on black-listing, 
247 ; Conspiracy, part in, 493 ; Ply- 
mouth Church, dropped by, 543 ; 
Tilton, Theodore, early troubles 
with, 491, reasons for reducing, 503, 
charged by, with scandalous stories, 
511 ; tripartite agreement, part in. 
512. 

Brice, Pomona, help afforded to, 293. 

Brooklyn, N. Y., H. W. Beecher 
called to, 187, 210-216, speech at, 
on return from England, 438, in 
answer to Wendell Phillips, 458 ; 
Common Council of, tender recep- 
tion to Mr. Beecher, 672 ; Four- 
teenth Regiment, equipment of, 316 ; 
martial spirit in, in 1861, 314 ; ser- 
vices in, at death of Mr. Beecher, 



index. 



705 



680 ; slaves ransomed in, 292-300 ; 

Thirteenth Regiment of, elects Mr. 

Beecher chaplain, 660. 
Brooks, Preston S , attack of, on 

Charles Sumner, 286 ; Mr. Beecher 

on, 287, 288. 
Brown,- John, H. W. Beecher on, 301, 

302 ; name of, a war-cry, 301 ; 

sketch of, 300. 
Brussels, Belgium, visit to, of Mr. 

Beecher, 403. 
Buchanan, Pres., administration of, 

305 ; election of, 291 ; fast-day of, 

307. 

Budington, Rev. W. I., Advisory 
Council (1876), refuses to attend, 
544 ; Beecher, H. W., enmity to, 
521 ; church of, divided on calling 
council, 523, protest on, 524, letter 
to, from Mr. Beecher, on protest, 
526. 

Bull Run defeat, H. W. Beecher on, 
320; effect of, at North, 319, 320. 

Burgess, Deacon, annually nominated 
for Legislature, 22. 

Burr, Betsey, 38. 

Calhoun, John C, on Compromise 
Bill, 236. 

California, admission of, as State, 235. 

Calvinism, H. W. Beecher's early 
training in, 70, 77 ; Beecher's, Ly- 
man, zeal for, 82 ; reaction against, 
in Massachusetts, 82, 83. 

Catlin, Dr. (Litchfield), reminiscence 
of, 36. 

Charleston, S. C., exercises at, in 
1865, addressed by Mr. Beecher, 
449-454 ; his sermon at, how pre- 
pared, 599. 

Chestnut Hill (Litchfield), 30. 

Children, H. W. Beecher's love for, 
639; method of whipping, one, 640; 
advice to his children on self-help, 
religion, Bible-reading, study, health 
and duty, choosing profession, lite- 
rary style, 641-644. 

Christian Union, H. W. Beecher 
editor of, 491 ; formation of, 491. 

Cincinnati, O., in 1834, 153; Beech- 
er's, H W., lecture in, in r86i, 309. 

Citizen, Brooklyn, on burial of Mr. 
Beecher, 680. 

Clay, Henry, Compromise measure of, 
235, Beecher, H. W., on, 237 ; Om- 
nibus Bill of, 236. 

Cleveland, Grover, slanders against, 
Mr. Beecher on, 577, 578 ; support- 
ed by, in 1884, 577-580. 



Cleveland, O., army and navy conven- 
tion at. object, 461, 464 ; invitation 
of, to Mr. Beecher, 461. 

Cleveland letters, history of, 461-478 ; 
invitation to Mr. Beecher by conven- 
tion, 461 ; reply, 465, public clamor 
against, 462 ; second letter, 472. 

Cobden, Richard, on English sympa- 
thy for American Union, 440. 

Compromise measures, acceptance of, 
by political parties, 257 ; Beech- 
er, H. W., on, 236-238, 306, 421 ; 
evil of, 235 ; introduction of, in 
Congress, 233 ; object of, 235 ; pas- 
sage of, 238 ; popular endorsement 
of, 257, 265. 

Congregational Association, H. W. 
Beecher resigns from, 567, statement 
to, 568 ; resolution of, on resigna- 
tion, 568. 

Congregational Church, proposed litur- 
gy for, 370; Beecher, H. \V., on ex- 
temporaneous prayer in, 371 ; of Eng- 
land, favors Confederacy, 400, 402, 
Mr. Beecher on, 401 ; Mr. Beecher's 
estimate of, 610 

Connecticut, Congregational churches 
of, withdraws aid from, 42 ; Society 
for Prevention of Vice, missionary 
societies in, 42 ; temperance ques- 
tion, 42. 

Conspiracy, the, H. W. Beecher's ac- 
count of, 495-520, on malignity of, 
546 ; beginning of, 493, 494 ; Bos- 
ton, rumors in, concerning, 534, 
Mr. Beecher's defence at, 535 ; 
Bowen's, H. C, part in, 493 ; civil 
suit, the, 533;Moulton, Mrs., against 
Mr. Beecher, 534 ; cost of, to Mr. 
Beecher, 549 ; end of, 562 ; "False 
Secret," the, 563 ; history of, 488- 
563 ; investigating committee on, 
499, 527-530, members of, Mr. 
Beecher's letter to, 528 ; Moulton, 
Frank, joins, 494 ; tripartite agree- 
mentin, 496, 497, 511, 512 ; Wood- 
hull scandal in, 513. 

Cowper, William, style of, 644. 

Cuba, annexation of, 280, 282 ; ex- 
pedition against, 281. 
Cunard steamers, H. W. Beecher on 

bigotry on, 350, 351. 
Cutler, W. T., in Mr. Beecher's call 
East, 210, 213 ; letter to, of Mr. 
Beecher, 210. 

Daniel, Samuel, poem of, quoted, 134. 
Dayton, George, neighbor at Peeks- 
kill, 623, 



jo6 



INDEX. 



Democratic party, ' divisions in, in 
1863, 398 ; losses of, in 1854, 273 ; 
success of, in 1852, 257, in 1856, 
291. 

Douglas, Stephen A , resolution of, to 
repeal Compromise, 272. 

Douglass, Fred. , invited to attend Ply- 
mouth Church, 248. 

Died Scott decision, the, 281 ; logical 
results of, 282. 

Eagle, Brooklyn, Tilton's infamous ar- 
ticle in (1873), 514. 

East Hampton, L. I., Beecher family 
in, 27, departure from, 29 ; school 
in, of Roxana Beecher, 28. 

Edinburgh, Scotland, H. W. Beecher's 
speech in, 419-422. 

Editor, H. W. Beecher on power of an, 
321 ; editorial articles of, sources, 
325, their characteristic features, 325, 
326. 

Edmonson sisters, freedom of, pur- 
chased, 292, 293. 

Election of 1884, H. W. Beecher's 
work in, 575~583 J review of, 585, 
586. 

Ellsworth, Col , H. W. Beecher on 
death of, 313. 

Emancipation, H. W. Beecher de- 
mands, 331, 332, 333 ; Proclamation 
of, article on, 336. 

Emery, S. Hopkins, reminiscences 
by, of H. W. Beecher, 114. 

Emigration societies, to aid fight in 
Kansas, 279. 

England : America, introduced slavery 

into, 431. Beecher's, H. W., 

visit to, in 1850, 339-349 ; impres- 
sions of Warwick, Kenilworth, 340, 
of Caesar's and Guy's Towers, 341, 
of Stratford- on- Avon, 342, 344, of 
Oxford, Bodleian Library, 344, 345. 
Trip to, in 1863, 396-436; speeches 
in Manchester, 408-414, in Liver- 
pool, 422-432, in London, 432-436 ; 
effect of speeches, 436, 441. Visit 
to, in 1886, 665-672 ; Westminster 
Abbey, visit to, 669 ; on customs at 
public meetings in, 670 ; address in 

City Temple, 671. Classes in, 

upper, favor Confederacy, 339, 400, 
438, reasons for, 439 ; laboring 

classes favor North, 400, 440. 

Confederate cruisers, building of, 

stopped, 410. Congregational 

clergy in, favor South, 400, 402 ; H. 

W. Beecher on, 401 Parliament 

of, willing to declare for South, 



406- Product of institutions of, 

in New England, 25. Public 

meetings in, customs at, 670. 

Queen of, a friend to North 439. 

Confederacy, results in, of its suc- 
cess, 429 ; feeling in favor of, uni- 
versal, 438. Vicksburg and Get- 
tysburg, effect of victories at, 406, 

441. War with, H. W. Beecher 

on, 322, 412. United States, 

reasons for wishing disruption of, 
402, 403, 439, 440 ; material reasons 
for supporting Northern cause, 428, 
429. 
Express, New York, on Fremont's 
marriage, 291. 

" False Secret," the, 563. 

Fast-day Buchanan's, 307. 

Field, Thomas P., reminiscences by, 

of H. W. Beecher, 96, 113, 115. 
Fitzgerald, W. P , H. W. Beecher's 

instructor in mathematics, 94. 
Foote, James, notice of, 21. 
Foote, Nathaniel, notice of, 21. 
Foote, Roxana — see Beecher, Roxana. 
Foote, Roxana Ward, names H. W. 

Beecher, 41 ; notice of, 22. 
Foote, Samuel, reminiscence of, 38. 
Fourteenth Regiment, formation of, 

316 ; H. W. Beecher's sermon to, 

317. 
Freedmen — see Negroes. 
Freedom of speech, H. W. Beecher on, 

243-245 ; on stifling of, in Kansas, 

284. 
Fremont, John C, marriage of, used 

against him, 290 ; nominated for 

President, 288 ; religion of, 291. 

Garrison, William L., H. W. Beecher 
on, 267. 

Gettysburg, victory at, effect in Eng- 
land, 406. 

Glasgow, Scotland, H. W. Beecher's 
speech in, in 1863, 414-419. 

Gould, Judge, law-school of, at Litch- 
field, 34, 37 ; reminiscence of, 36. 

Grant, Gen., and Mr. Beecher's mili- 
tary titles, 663. 

Guilford, Conn., 22, 23. 

Hall, Rev. Charles H., friendship of, 

for H. W. Beecher, 677 ; preaches 

at his death, 678. 
Hanks, S. W. , reminiscence by, of H. 

W. Beecher, 114. 
Harrington, Moody, a religious helper 

to H. W. Beecher, 120, 121, 



INDEX. 



707 






Haven, John, reminiscence by, of H. 

W. Beecher, 113. 
Hopkinton, Mass., H. "VV. Beecher's 

school at, 129. 
Hubbard, Aunt Mary, 38 ; death of, 

42. 

Independent, the, H. W. Beecher's 
early contributions to, 320, 488, 
editor of, 321, 488, editorials in 
(1862), 322-336, assailed in, for 
Cleveland letters, 469, 491, 501 ; 
conduct of, protest against, 491 ; 
influence of, early, 490 ; purpose of, 
321 ; rivals of, 491, 492; Tilton, 
Theodore, editor of, 490, resigns, 
492. 

Independent Republicans, H. W. 
Beecher on, 561, 583. 

Indianapolis, Ind., H. W. Beecher 
called to, 179, 181, his churches at, 
181, 183, departure from, 216 ; con- 
dition of, in 1839, 181, 206; railroad 
train from, the first, 207, 216. 

Indians, antiquities of, at Litchfield, 
31 ; Lyman Beecher's labors among, 
27. 

Ingersoll, Mrs., reminiscence of, 72. 

Investigating Committee (in Con- 
spiracy), asked for, by Mr. Beecher, 
528 ; report of, 530. 

Ireland, American sympathy for, 265. 

Johnson, Pres., plan of, as to recon- 
struction, 458, H. W. Beecher to, 
460 ; course of, Northern ange* 
against, 462, 469-471. 

Jones, Mr., part of, in " Temple Melo- 
dies," 363, 364. 

Journal of Commerce, New York, H. 
W. Beecher's criticism on, 334. 

Kansas, H. W. Beecher on the con- 
test in, 283, 301; Brown, John, in, 
300; emigrants to, rush of, 279, H. 
W. Beecher on, 284; forces in, op 
posing, 280 ; freedom, personal, en 
dangered in, 284 ; governors of, de- 
posed, 282; importance of, in slavery 
contest, 277 ; Lecompton Constitu- 
tion, adoption of, 278, rejected by 
the people, 282; Legislatures of, the 
two, 279, 280; rifles sent to, by Mr. 
Beecher, 283, 286 ; situation in. in 
1855, 278 ; slave-laws of, 278, 2S4 ; 
Topeka Constitution, adoption of, 
279; war in, beginning of, 271, deeds 
committed in, 279, results of, 282, 
300. 



Kilbourne, "Ma'am," H.W. Beecher's 

first teacher, 50. 
Kossuth, Louis, sketch of, visit to 

America, 256, 352. 

Landon, Sheriff, reminiscence of, 37. 

Lane Seminaiy, Ohio, Lyman Beech- 
er president of. 136, gives earnest 
tone to, 137; object of, 136; slavery 
question at, 137. 

Langdon, Mr., school of, attended by 
H.W. Beecher, 72; teaching, method 
of, 74. 

Lawrenceburg, Ind., H. W. Beecher 
called to, 157, residence at, 174, 176, 
success at, 173, 176; church of, inde- 
pendent, 162, 167 ; description of, 

158, 159- 

" Lectures to Young Men," purpose of, 
200; publishing of, 201. 

Lecture-room talks of H. W. Beecher: 
Conversion of Philippian Jailer 
(1S58), 376; Division in Presbyterian 
Church, 163; Emancipation Procla- 
mation, 337; Love to Enemies, 311. 

Lenox, Mass., H. W. Beecher's farm 
at > 359. 360, 618; residence at, given 
up, 372. 

Leopold, King, receives H.W. Beecher, 
suggests compromise in Rebellion, 
404 ; Mr. Beecher's advice to, on 
Mexico, 405. 

Letters quoted: Beecher, H. W., to 
Dr. Bacon, March, 1876, 560. To 
Barnabas Bates, October 12, 1852, 
261. To Mrs. Beecher, May 17, 
1849, IO °; 1873, 508; on his health, 
654. To Edward Beecher, July II, 
1829, 99 ; August, 1829, 100. To 
William Beecher. 1832, 129. To 
Dr. Budington, 1874, 526. To W. 
T. Cutler, December 15, 1846, 210. 
To Richard Hale, October 12, 1852, 
261. To Indianapolis Church, Au- 
gust 12, 1847, 214. To Investigating 
Committee, 1874, 528. To R. W. 
Landis, October 12, 1852, 262. To 
Frank Moulton, June, 1873, 515. 
To Plymouth Church, August 19, 
1847, 215. To S. Scoville, on Am- 
bition, 594. To St. Louis Library 
Association, 1859, 390. To Mrs. 
Tilton, November, 1872, 513. To 
New York Tribune, 268, 269. To 
Dr. Tyng, September 6, 1866, 470. 
To his sister, 181 7, 50; December 
24, 1828, 97 ; March 1, 1830, 101 ; 
1831, 117; 1837, 171. To his daugh- 
ter, November, 1853, 358 ; June 



7o8 



INDEX. 



24, 1854, 358; 1859, 383, 384; Feb- 
ruary 11, i860, 385 ; February 14, 
i860, 387. To his children, 642- 
646. To Colonel of Thirteenth Regi- 
ment, December 19, 1884, 662; Feb- 
ruary 12, 1885, 663. Bacon, 

Dr. Leonard, to H. W. Beecher, 

February 27, 1876, 559. Moul- 

ton, Frank, to H. W. Beecher, June 

1, 1873, 5 1 ?- Storrs, R. S., to 

H. W. Beecher, November 2, 1872, 
520. St. Louis Library Associa- 
tion to H. W. Beecher, 1859, 389. 

Tyng, Dr. S. H., to H. W. 

Beecher, 1866, 469. 

" Life of Christ." first volume of, com- 
pleted, 480, 674 ; second volume of, 
work on, 673, 674 ; prophetic words 
cf Mr. Beecher on, 674. 

Lincoln, Pres., II. W. Beecher's con- 
fidence in, 304 ; work for, 305 ; on 
call of, for soldiers, 327, 328 ; on 
vacillation of, in 1862, 329, 444 ; on 
invincible purpose of, in 1863, 398 ; 
visit to, in 1864, 446 ; tribute to, 

447. Emancipation Proclamation 

of, 336. Nomination of , 304. 



Restoration of South, favors imme- 
diate, 465. Nomination of, for 

presidency, 304. 
Lind, Jenny, H. W. Beecher's defence 

of, 35i. 

Litchfield, Conn., antiquities of, 31 ; 
appearance of, in 1S56, 35-38 ; 
Beecher, Lyman, called to, 29, resi- 
dence and household at, 38, 62, 63 ; 
courts of, their brilliancy, 34 ; de- 
scription of, by H. W. Beecher, 30 ; 
education and religion, reputation 
for, 33, 34 ; foundation of, wisdom 
shown in, 33 ; natural beauties of, 
32,33; paradise, a, for a boy, 31; 
patriotism of, during Revolution, 
34 ; school of, H. W. Beecher at, 
51-53 ; situation of, 30, 31 ; winter 
in, H. W. Beecher on, 62. 

Litchfield Hill, 30. 

Little Pond (Litchfield), 31. 

Liverpool, England, Mr. Beecher's 
first speech in, in 1863, 401, second 
speech, 422-432, placarded in, 422, 
threats against, 423, reception of, 
424 ; Cornier of, on Mr. Beecher, 
422. 

London, England, Mr. Beecher's first 
speeches in, in 1863, 401, 402 ; 
second speech in, 422-436 

Lord, Mrs. (Litchfield), reminiscence 
of, 37- 



Love, Mr., author of " Shining Shore," 
366. 

Lovell, John E., Mr. Beecher's in- 
structor in elocution, 95. 

McClellan, Gen. George, defeat of, 
327 ; H. W. Beecher on, 328. ■ 

McLean, Judge John, on H. W. 
Beecher's slavery sermons, 196, 197. 

Manchester, Eng., Mr. Beecher's 
speech at, 408-414. 

Mason, Lowell, on hymn-music, 365. 

Massachusetts Emigrant Company, 
work of, 279. 

Matteawan, N. Y., Beecher family at, 
372, 618. 

Missouri Compromise, the, 235 ; re- 
peal of, proposed, 272, effected, 277, 
clerical protest against, 273, H. W. 
Beecher's articles on, 273-277. 

Mitchel, John, H. W. Beecher's pro- 
phecy on, 266 ; slavery, views on, 
265. 

Moulton, Frank, assurances of, to H. 
W. Beecher, 496, 497 ; urges him to 
write to Mrs. Tilton, 507 ; urges let- 
ter from, clearing Tilton, 515 ; let- 
ter to, June 1, 1873, 5*7 J inno- 
cence of, affirms, 518. Conspiracy 

against Mr. Beecher, joins, 494. 

Indicted by Grand Jury, 533. In- 
vestigating Committee, fails to at- 
tend, 529. Part of, in $5,000 to 

Tilton, 519. Tilton's cause, ad- 
vocacy of, 505. Wife of, dropped 

by Plymouth, results, 534. 

Montague, George, recollections by, 
of H. W. Beecher, 93, 95. 

Mount Pleasant Institute, appearance 
of, in 1849, 107; Beecher, H. W., 
enters, 93 ; lotteries at, 118 ; stand- 
ing of, 94. 

Mount Tom Hill (Litchfield), 30 ; sig- 
nal station at ; ancient, 31. 

Music, H. W. Beecher's early work in, 
92, 124, 138, 139, 144 ; church 
music, an old method of, 363, reform 
in, 365; "Plymouth Collection," 
compilation of, 363-366 ; hymn- 
music, H. W. Beecher's views on, 
366. 367 ; organ, value of, to H. W. 
Beecher, 600. 

Napoleon III., Mexican campaign of, 

sympathy witb Confederacy, 399. 
Negroes, H. W. Beecher on help to 

fugitive, 240, 241, on return of. 

252 ; on social ostracism of, 247 ; 

on treatment of, at North, 247 248, 



INDEX. 



709 



303 ; on freedom given to eight, 
263 ; on benefits to, from admission 
of South, 463, 467 ; suffrage refused 
to, 474. 

Nettleton, Mr., revival by, at Litch- 
field, 77, 80. 

Newell, Constantine, character of, ic-6; 
covenant of, with H. W. Beecher, 
104 ; history of, 105. 

New England, H. W. Beecher a 
product of, 25, 26 ; influence of, on 
the nation, 25 ; slavery in, Mr. 
Beecher on, 250. 

New Jersey, slave erased from Prayer- 
Book of, 254. 

New York, law of , as to slaves, 251. 

New York City, corrupt judiciary of 
(1867-71), 572. 

North, the, admission of Southern 
States, fear from, 466, 467 ; block- 
ade by, in 1863, 399 ; feeling at, 
against Compromise, 235. 236, for 
Compromise, 238 ; Fugitive Slave 
Law, abhorrence of, 239, 240 ; in- 
dustry in, universal, 418 ; merchants 
at, black-listed, 247 ; political par- 
ties in, in 1863, 398 ; population 
and intelligence of country resident 
in, 413 ; Rebellion, military ardor 
in, in 1861, 314, 315, desolation 
from, 315, unity of, not to be broken 
by> 3 2 7. conflicting schemes in, 330, 
army of, in 1863, 397 ; slaveiy at, 
abolition of, 251 ; soldiers of, on 
exclusion of South, 461, 462 ; Sum- 
ter, Fort, excitement over fall of, 
314 ; workingman, doctrine as to 
(1863), 419. 

Norwich, N. Y., H. W. Beecher on, 
389. 

" Nutplains," Roxana Foote at, 22- 
24, 26, 27. 

Omnibus Bill, Clay's, 236. 

Omnibuses of New York and negroes, 
247, 248. 

Ostend Manifesto, the, 280. 

Oxford Presbytery, rule of, as to licen- 
ses, 159, 166 ; H. \V. Beecher ex- 
amined by, i6r, 162, 166. 

Paris, France, H. \V. Beecher's visit 

to, its art-galleries, 346-348. 
Parker, Theodore, H. \V. Beecher on, 

380, 381. 
Parker, Dr. (London), tribute of, to 

Mr. Beecher, 669. 
Parker, — (Litchfield), reminiscence 

of, 37- 



Parker controversy, the, 257-262. 
Peekskill, N. Y., farm at, 383 ; de- 
scription, 619, 620 ; cottage at, 620 ; 
old apple-tree at, 621 ; products of, 
623 ; flowers at, 626 ; new house at, 
628-630, decoration of, 630 ; trees 
and shrubs at, (30, 632; fowls at, 
634, the patent hatcher, 635 ; cattle 
ai,636; bees at, 636, 637 ; dogs at, 
637, " Tommy," 63S. 
Phillips, Wendell, experiences of, in 

Brooklyn, 246 
Phrenology, H. \V. Beecher's adoption 

of, 130. 
Pierce, Pres. , Ostend Manifesto in- 
spired by, 280 ; peace, hopes for, 
265 ; qualifications of, for office, 
257. 
Pierce, Misses, ladies' school of, at 
Litchfield, 34 ; reminiscence of, 36. 
'Pinky," freedom of, bought at Ply 

mouth, 294-296. 
Plymouth Church, Advisory Council 
(1874), declines to attend, 527; deliv- 
erance of, how affected by, 527. Ad- 
visory Council (1876), calls an, 537; 
composition of, 538; questions dis- 
cussed by, 53S; sustained by, 549; 
recommends committee on charges, 
550. Beecher, H. W.. generos- 
ity to, in Conspiracy, 565; his ser- 
mons in, in 1864, 571; welcome to, 
in 1886, 672; service in, at death of, 

678; memorial service in. 680. 

Building, the new, 387. Burning 

of first building, 222. Call of, 

to Mr. Beecher, 214. Condition 

of, in 1858, 374. Courtesy at, by 

pewholders, 379, ?8o. Danger 

to, from mobs, 246 - — Debt of, 
extinguished (185 1), 353. Flow- 
ers in, introduction of, 392. 

Formation of, 213, 214. Genero- 
sity of members of, 216. Growth 

and popularity of, 222-224. 225, 

480. Income of, criticism on, 

379. Influence of, 480. In- 
vestigating Committee, accepts re- 
port of, 530. Lecture at, weekly, 

229. Members in (1862), recep- 
tion of, 392; exercised over Cleve 
land letter, 472; number of, in 1872, 
480; troubles caused by. after Scan- 
dal, 537; duty of, as to Adviso- 
ry Council, 539-542. Moulton, 

Mrs., dropped by. 534. Organ 

at, the new (1859), 382 Phillips, 

Wendell, at, 246. Polity of, 232. 

Prayer-meetings at, weekly, 



7io 



INDEX. 



230; daily, 376, influence of, 377, 

prayers in, 378. Regiments, 

rendezvous for, 316. Revival at, 

in 1848, 222; in 1858, 375; in 1861- 

°3» 39 1 - Sheridan's victory, joy 

over, 450. Silver Wedding of, 

480; Children's day, 481; Members' 
and Historical days, 482; Commu- 
nion day, 486; Storrs's, Dr., speech 

at, 484-486. Slavery, its stand 

against, 221. Slaves ransomed 

in, 293-300. Sociable at, week- 
ly. 231. Sunday-schools of, 

480. Sunday services in, 228, 

229. Tabernacle, building of, 

223. Tilton, Theodore, dropped 

from rolls of, remonstrances against, 

523. 

"Plymouth Collection." history of, 
363-366; terms of publishing of, 
364; a model for others, 365; H. 
W. Beecher on alleged omissions 
from, 368. 

Porter, Pres. Noah, letter to H. W. 
Beecher on Conspiracy, 532. 

Prayer, H. W. Beecher's early love 
for, 97, 100; sample of, 228; on ex- 
temporaneous, 371; reply to request 
for copy of a, 656. 

Presbyterian Church, division in, 151, 
159, 165, one cause of, 160, one re- 
sult of, 168; H. W. Beecher on, 163. 

Prohibition party, H. W. Beecher on, 

583. 
Prospect Hill (Litchfield), 30. 

Raymond, John, sails for England 
with H. W. Beecher, 396; speech 
of, in London. 401. 

Rebellion, the, H. W. Beecher on, 
310, 313, 314; sacrifices for, 316; on 
Union soldier's duty in, 317, 318; 
on Southern unity and Northern un- 
certainty in, 330; on distinction be- 
tween Union troops in, 443; on end 

of, 451, 455- Beginning of, 309 

European sentiment regarding, 

400. Federal army in, condition 

of, in 1863, 397. Federal disasters 

in, in 1862, 327. 

Reconstruction, H. W. Beecher on, 
458-461, sermon on, 463; feeling 
as to, in North, 464; Johnson's, 
Pres., plan of, 458; problem of, 457 

Reeve, Judge Tapping, law-school of, 
at Litchfield, 34, 37. 

Reeve, Mrs., death of Roxana Beech- 
er, description of, 48. 

Republican party, the, advantages of, 



over rivals, 289; H. W. Beecher's 
early work for, 289, in i860, 305, in 
1864, 571, reasons for opposing in 
1884, 581-583; campaign song of, 
289; charge against, a, answered, 
307; corruptions in, 574; formation 
and composition of, 288; issue of, 
in 1860,304; Lincoln nominated by, 
304; platform of, first, 288; South, 
exclusion of, minority against, 461, 
restoration of, by the party, 477. 

Roebuck, John (England), favors 
South, why, 403. 

Ruffin, Judge (N. C). on legal status 
of slaves, 249. 

Ruskin. John, influence of, on H. W. 
Beecher. 394. 

Russell, Lord John, support by, of 
American Union, 431, 433. 

Salisbury, Conn., H. W. Beecher at, 
618. 

Sawmill Pond (Litchfield), 31. 

Sawyer, Martha, gives H. W. Beecher's 
first call, 157. 

Scandal — see Conspiracy. 

Scotland, H. W. Beecher's tribute to, 
415 ; his speeches in, 415-422. 

Secession, decree of, 305 ; H. W. 
Beecher on, 307 

Sermons of H. W. Beecher quoted : 
American Democracy, Success of 
(1862), 326; Background of Mys- 
tery, 567 ; Camp, The (1861). 319 ; 
Campaign of 1884, 584 ; Compro- 
mise, Against (i860), 306 ; Confi- 
dence in Union Success (1862), 333 ; 
Crisis, The (1861). 310 ; Death of 
the Soldier (1861), 3^; Evolution 
and Religion, 567 ; Fast-day of Bu- 
chanan (186 1), 307 ; Government, 
Divine (1862), 326 ; God in Nation- 
al Affairs (1 861), 319; Harper's 
Ferry Tragedy (1859), 301 ; Indi- 
vidual Responsibility, 219 ; Lin- 
coln's Assassination, 455 ; Modes 
and Duties of Emancipation (1861), 
320 ; Our National Flag (1861). 317 ; 
Past Perils and Perils of To day, 
574 ; Phillips, Wendell (1884), 245; 
Revivals (1858), 375 ; first sermons 
in Plymouth, 218 ; Trial Sermon, 
685. 

Shearman, Thomas G., services of, in 
Conspiracy, 549. 

Sheldon, Dr. (Litchfield), reminis- 
cence of, 36. 

" Shining Shore," history of, 366; H. 
W. Beecher's liking for, 379. 



INDEX. 



711 



Silver-Grays, the, 288, 289. 

Sixty-seventh N. Y. Regiment, equip- 
ment of, by Mr. Beecher, 317, 489. 

Slavery, battle against, 233, 271 ; 
Beecher's, H. \V., debate on, at 
Amherst, 119, sermons on, in Indi- 
anapolis, 195, their effect, 196, 197, 
in Brooklyn, 219, 220 ; Christianity 
against, power of, 268 ; Church's 
timidity as to, 221, 254 ; Compro- 
mise measures on, 233-239 ; Consti- 
tution, ballot, and Church as forces 
against, 267 ; doctrine of, 419 ; 
dominance of , in 1857, 2 % T 5 eras °U 
five, 234 ; feeling towards, in Indi- 
ana, 196, in United States in 1854, 
271 ; at Lane Seminary, 137 ; mili- 
tary question, a, 331 ; Mitchel's, 
John, views on, 265 ; preaching 
against, threatened, 248, H. W. 
Beecher on, 248-252 ; religious soci- 
eties, attitude of, 252 ; treatment of, 
H. W. Beecher on, 303, 331. 

Slaves, eight freed by law in New 
York, 263 ; Beecher, H. W., on 
help of, 240, on pulpit work for, 
248-252, on return of fugitive, 252, 
on proper treatment of, 303, 304 ; 
freedom purchased for, in Brooklyn, 
292-300; hunting of, in 1851, 255 ; 
ignorance of, why necessary, 417 ; 
Kansas laws against, 278 ; status of, 
religious, 248, legal, 249. 

Smith, Charles, influence of, on H. 
W. Beecher, 66, 69, 431. 

South, the, advantage to, of Compro- 
mise Bill, 235, 238. Civil liberty 

in, suppression of, 413. Cruisers 

for, building stopped by queen, 410. 

English sympathy for, 399-401, 

413. Grievance of, on slavery, 

238, 272. Labor in, dishonora- 
ble (1863), 4r8. Northern mer- 
chants black-listed by, 247. Re- 
bellion, unity of purpose in, 330 : 
vehemence and courage in, 39S ; 
caused by political leaders of, 454. 

Slavery in, code of, 251 ; plan of, 

for spreading slavery, 429. States 

of, decree secession, 305 ; reconstruc- 
tion of, problem as to, 457 ; effect of 
exclusion of, 459 ; Northern soldiers 
against exclusion of, 461 ; Northern 
fear from admission of, 466 ; H. W. 
Beecher's mediation for, 612. 

Speeches of H. W. Beecher quoted: 
at Charleston (1865), 451-454 ; Ed- 
inburgh (1863), 419-422 ; Glasgow 
(1863), 4T4-419; Liverpool (1863), 



419-422 ; London (1863), 432-436 ; 

Manchester (1863), 410-414 ; North 

Victorious, The (18(5), 458. 
Spenser, Edmund, " Faerie Queene " 

quoted, 156. 
Stanton, Edwin M., note to, from H. 

W. Beecher in 1864, and reply, 447 ; 

Charleston, proposes to send Mr. 

Beecher to, 448 ; Fort Sumter, fall 

of, order on anniversary of, 449 ; 

telegram of, as to Sheridan's victory, 

451. 

Stockton, Col. T. B. W., sent to Lin- 
coln by Mr. Beecher, 443. 

Storrs, Dr. R. S., Advisory Council 
(1876), declines to * attend, 544 ; 
Beecher, H. W., address on English 
speeches of, 437, letter to, on Cleve- 
land letters, 471, 477, tribute to 
(1872), 484-486, letter of help to, 
520, refuses reconciliation with, 561 ; 
hostility of, to H. W. Beecher, rea- 
sons for, 521 ; judgment as to Mr. 
Beecher, onex-parte testimony, 522 ; 
Moulton, Mrs., assumes cause of, 
560 ; Tilton's influence on, 513. 

Stowe, Calvin E., assistance of, to H. 
\V. Beecher, 137. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, attainments of 
H. W. Beecher, remarks on, 70, on 
studies of, 74 ; Beecher, Harriet, 
reminiscence of, 54 ; childhood of, 
impressions of, 57 ; diligence of, ear- 
ly, 56 ; her mother's death, recollec- 
tions of, 48, 49 ; Parker controversy, 
part taken in, 259, 260; reminiscences 
of, 55 ; Roxana Beecher, tribute to, 
24 ; tulip-bulbs, adventure with, 

47- 
Sturtevant, Dr., on H. W. Beecher, 

551. 

Sumner, Charles, attack on, by Pres- 
ton Brooks, 286 ; meeting on, in 
New York, 287 ; H. W. Beecher 
on, 287, 288. 

Sumter, Fort, anniversary of fall of, 
exercises at, 449-454; fall of, 309, 
excitement in North, 314. 

Tallmadge, Col. (Litchfield), 35 ; re- 
miniscence of, 36. 

Tappan, Lewis, reminiscences by, of 
H. W. Beecher, 114, 117. 

Temperance, H. W. Beecher's early 
work in, 130, 138, 144, 147, in Law- 
renceburg, 185, practice of, at Ox- 
ford, Eng., 345, to his daughter on, 
384. habits as to, 652, 653; Lyman 
Beecher's action on, 42. 



712 



INDEX. 



Terre Haute, Ind., H. W. Beecher's 
reminiscence of, 190-192 

Texas, effect on, of Compromise, 235. 

Thayer, Hon. Eli, in Kansas struggle, 
279. 

Thirteenth Regiment, Brooklyn, H.W. 
Beecher as chaplain of, 660 ; Com- 
pany G of, guard at his funeral, 678. 

Thomas, Rev. John H., on H. W. 
Beecher's Lawrenceburg pastorate, 
176. 

Tilton, Theodore, associations of, evil, 
497. Beecher, H. W., early af- 
fection for, letter to, 489 ; esteems 
himself greater than, 490, 492 ; whis- 
pers stories against, 492; hostility to, 
first charge against, 493; demand on, 
to leave Brooklyn, 494, 503 ; treach- 
ery to, 496 ; urges him to use his 
house, 500 ; bitterest against, when 
in pecuniary difficulties, 510; secures 
$5,000 from, 519; blackmail of, at- 
tempted, 520; charge against, makes 
open, 527 ; civil suit against, 533. 

Blackmail, attempts at, 499, 520. 

Bowen, Henry C., denies tales 

of, 490 ; claim against, for $7,000, 
496 ; charge against, 511, secures 

publication of, 515. Charge of, 

denied by Mrs. Tilton, 529; specific 
charge, 530 ; charge changed, 532. 

Church-membership, proposed 

deprivation of, 509. Counsel 

of, declares Mr. Beecher innocent, 

534. Eagle, Brooklyn, infamous 

article in, 514. " Editorial Soli- 
loquy" of, 491. Family of, H. 

W. Beecher's intimacy with, 501. 

Independent, assistant editor of, 

488; editor of, 490; resigns editor- 
ship, 492. Indicted by Grand 

Jury, 533. Investigating Com- 
mittee, before the, 529. Lectur- 
ing, failure at, blames Mr. Beecher, 

510. Moral conduct of, 506. 

Observer, work on, 488. Ply- 
mouth Church, dropped from rolls 

of, 523. Sketch of, 488. 

Stories of past life of, 493. 

Storrs, Dr R. S, T. reads "True 

Statement" to, 521. Tripartite 

agreement, signs, 496; his changes 

in, object of, 497; part in, 512. 

"True Statement'' of, results, 513. 

Views of, "advanced," 491, 

502 ; public protest against, 501. 

Wife, treatment of his, she 

asks advice of Mr. Beecher, 502; in- 
criminating document extorted from, 



504. Woodhull, Victoria, alli- 
ance with, 510; scandal version of 

Mrs. W., statement on, 513 

Union, Brooklyn, editor of, 492. 

Toombs, Senator Robert, threat of, 
concerning Fugitive Slave Bill. 236. 

Trent affair, the, 322; English papers 
on Mr. Beecher's action in, 422. 

Tripartite agreement, history of, 511, 
512; publication of, 515, Tilton's 
rage at, 515, 516. 

Turner, Thomas J., superintendent at 
"Boscobel," 624-626. 

Tyng, Rev. Stephen H., on Mr. 

- Beecher's Cleveland letter, 469. 

Union Sewing Committee, formation 
of, 247, 

Unitarian movement in Massachusetts, 
82, 83 ; Sabbath- school, ostracism 
of a, 355, 356. 

United States, Administration of, in 
Kansas struggle, 277-280 ; pro 
slavery, 291 ; inactivity of, in 1862, 
324, H. W. Beecher on, 328,329, on 
mismanagement by, in 1862, 329. on 
duty of, 330, 331 ; distrusts Mr. 
Beecher in 1863, 397, changes its 
opinion of him, 444 Commercial 



disaster in, in 1857, 371, 375 

Compromise in 1854, feeling on, 265; 
schemes of, in i860, 306 Condi- 
tion of, in 1813, 41, 42. Con- 
gress of, and President Johnson, 
458, 469, 470; constitutional amend- 
ment by, proposed, 473-475 ; suffrage 
to negroes, refuses, 474 Elec- 
tions of 1884, condition after, 586. 

Federal army of, in 1863, 397. 

Free trade in, a future certainty, 

429. Ireland, sympathy for, 265. 

Navy of, H. W. Beecher on, 

399. Political condition of, in 

1863, 398 Policy of, fifteen 

years, Southern, 420. Reaction 

in, for Compromise, in 1851, 255. 

Reconstruction in, problem of, 

457 Repeal of Compromise, ex- 
citement over. 273. Senators of, 

pledged to Compromise, 257 ; plot 
for rebellion in 1856-60, 305.— — 
Slavery in, in 1854, feeling on, 271. 
States of, decree secession, 305. 

Vicksburg, fall of, effect on H. W. 
Beecher, 405 ; effect of, in Great 
Britain, 406. 

Ward, Andrew, sketch of, 22, 



INDEX. 



7^ 



Ward, Col. Andrew, sketch of, 22. 
Ward, Gen. Andrew, sketch of, 22, 

23- 

Webster, Daniel, support by, of Com- 
promise Bill, 236, 238. 

Weld, Theodore, in early slavery move- 
ments, 138. 

Wellman, Dr., on H. W. Beecher, 
550. 

Westminster Abbey, H. W. Beecher's 
visit to, 669. 

Whig party, defeat of, in 1S52, 257 ; 
extinction of, in 1854, 273. 



White Mountains, II . W. Beecher's 

summer services in, 660. 
Wilkeson, Mr., part of, in Conspiracy, 

515. 
Wolcott, Oliver, King George's statue 

melted by, 34. 
Wolcott, Gov. Oliver, Jr., reminiscence 

of, 35- 
Woodhull, Victoria, blackmail of II. 

W. Beecher, attempted, 513 ; letters 

in possession of, Mr. Beecher on, 

522 ; scandal, version of, published, 

510,513, 520. 



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